Gum Drops
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the starch
Dissolve the cooking starch in 3 gallons of water, stirring with your hands.
Make the syrup
In a steam stirring kettle, combine the sugar and glucose with 7.5 gallons of water.
Boil the mixture for about 20 minutes.
Slowly add the dissolved starch to the mixture.
Boil for 2.5 hours until clear and it runs off in long strings when tested with a palette knife.
Set, shape and dry
Pour the mixture into warm starch.
Place trays in a warm room for several days.
Remove from starch, brush off excess.
Place 10 pounds of the mixture in a basin.
Wet your hands and run them through the drops until slightly sticky.
Coat the drops with sugar. Mix the drops with the sugar.
Sift them out with a coarse sieve. Place on trays.
Set the trays in a drying room overnight.
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
What each ingredient does
- Cooking starch
- Forms a set gel in the mould, giving the drops their firm, chewy body.
- Sugar
- Provides sweetness and, once boiled down, helps set the firm texture of the drops.
- Glucose
- Limits sugar crystallisation, keeping the drops smooth and chewy rather than grainy.
The step that matters
Boil until the strings test correct. The syrup must be cooked long enough to reach the right concentration. Undercooked syrup stays too soft to set, while overcooked syrup becomes too firm and brittle. The palette knife test shows when it is ready.
“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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