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Dessert

Cocoanut Taffy

A chewy sweet made by cooking sugar with coconut and pulling the mixture into strips.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Cocoanut Taffy

Ingredients

Directions

Make the taffy

  1. In a large pot, combine sugar and cream of tartar (or glucose).

  2. Cook over medium heat until it reaches the hard crack stage.

  3. Add the grated coconuts and stir until the mixture reaches the soft crack stage.

  4. Pour the mixture out onto a surface at once.

Pull and shape

  1. When cool enough to handle, pull the taffy until it turns white.

  2. Run it out into strips and cut into desired lengths.

  3. Wrap each piece in wax paper.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Cream + coconuttop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,223 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Sugar + coconuttop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,742 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Forms the sweet base that cooks into the taffy mass.
Cream of tartar
Acidity that helps keep the sugar smooth rather than grainy.
Glucose
Interferes with sugar crystallisation, keeping the taffy smooth and chewy.
Grated coconuts
Adds coconut flavour, moisture and fat to the candy.

The step that matters

Stopping the cook at the soft crack stage. Sugar syrup temperature sets the final texture. Cooking past the target stage makes the taffy hard and brittle, while stopping early leaves it sticky and soft. Watching the stage closely matters because the syrup changes quickly near the end.

Swap the coconut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, cream):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Raspberryfits better
  4. Coconutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, cream. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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