Peanut Butter or Chocolate Fudge: The Sticky Cousin to Caramel
If you guessed something like chocolate fudge or peanut butter fudge, you’d be correct. Really, we consider any type of fudge a cousin to caramel. Today we’ll look at an incredible fudge record created in 2010, plus places serving fudge near you. Because, let’s face it, making good quality fudge can be hard!
So, let’s begin in the kitchen where a person really only needs three everyday ingredients: sugar, milk, and butter. Being household staples, it’s easy to understand how this candy rose in popularity ticking the candy boxes of inexpensive and accessible. However, the actual process of incorporating all of it together for a smooth and creamy, good-quality fudge, distinguishable from a regular run-of-the-mill fudge, requires some skills.
Firstly, you must heat all the ingredients to the “soft-ball” stage, as they call it. In this stage, it can be hard to stop the sugar from rapidly forming large crystals. That’s why fats or syrups must be added at precisely the right moment. Controlling the crystallization is the key to avoiding an inferior, gritty, and grainy low-quality fudge. Luckily, if you find it too challenging, check out these fudge options near you. This way you can easily avoid that unnecessary kitchen stress!
Broken Records and Fudge Varieties
Knowing a thing or two about smooth chocolate fudge, a team of Canadians hailing from the Northwest Fudge Factory in Levack, Ontario (up near Sudbury) broke a new fudge record in 2010 that is worth writing home about. After one solid week of work, the crew successfully created the largest slab of fudge, weighing in at a whopping 2.61 tonnes. Flavours included delicious ingredients like chocolate, vanilla, and maple. We must note here, this really was a significant record. The previous world record holder has only made a slab of fudge that was 0.3 tonnes!
While maple-loving Canada perfected the development of the maximum quantity of fudge, we attribute the actual creation to the late 19th-century US. To this day, maple and peanut butter fudge both reign supreme as preferred US flavours. Travelling across the pond to the UK, fudge fans are spoiled for choices of rum and raisin. They even have toffee flavoured fudges! Just don’t be scared if you see the worked sweetmeats in the place of “fudge”. That’s a UK thing… We can really add any fruits, nuts, chocolate, caramels, and candies to fudge, either inside during the process, or on top while the slab is cooling down.
Similarly, you can add fudge to a variety of desserts to make them even better. One that we immediately think of is the hot fudge sundae, which was invented over 100 years ago in Hollywood! Here, heavy cream replaces butter, giving us that incredibly gooey sauce that goes so well on anything frozen.
For the regular solid form, you can always look here to find the freshest fudge options near you. So whichever fudge you choose, why not trick your friends by telling them you just ate some sweetmeats?
