Fudge

Recipe first, commentary later. About an hour total.

Equipment

• Medium pot

• Candy thermometer

• Brownie or loaf pan

• Stand mixer with paddle attachment

Ingredients

• 175 g milk

• 450 g sugar

• 1 tsp. (5 g) vanilla extract

• 3 Tblsp. (45 g) peanut butter (optional)

• 180 g chocolate (chips or bar)

• 1 Tblsp. (15 g) butter

• Extra butter for greasing pan

Cook Sugar

• 450 g sugar

• 175 g milk

Put the sugar and milk into the pot.

Set the stove to medium-high heat and stir until the milky sugar mixture comes to a lively frothy boil. Stop stirring, and don’t stir again until the directions say to. Put the thermometer in the pot.

Wait until the temperature gets to 237°F, or 114°C. This makes a soft ball when dropped in water, but just use the thermometer[1].

Measure Butter

• 15 g butter

While that’s heating, measure out the butter if you haven’t already. Now go back to obsessively watching the thermometer.

Cool / Measure

• 15 g Butter

• 180 g Chocolate

• 45 g Peanut butter

• 5 g Vanilla

As soon as the sugar hits the soft ball stage, remove it from the heat and put the butter in. Do not stir it in, just let it melt on top. Leave the thermometer in, too. While that’s cooling…

If you’re using a chocolate bar instead of chips, now is a good time to chop it up. If you’re using chocolate chips, measure them out.

Also measure the vanilla extract and peanut butter.

Grease the pan.

Stir

• 5 g Vanilla

• 45 g Peanut butter

• 180 g Chocolate

Once the sugar/milk comes down to below 150°F or so, pour it along with the vanilla and peanut butter into the stand mixer. Set the mixer to medium and watch and listen carefully.

As soon as the mixer’s sound changes, or the mixture starts to lose its gloss (whichever comes first) stop the mixer and dump the chocolate in[2]. Pour/scrape the mixture into the pan, mush it down, and put it in the fridge.

Commentary

I guess this is just a cooking blog now. This post makes 5 recipes in a row.

Pitfalls

There are a lot of things that can go wrong here. Most perilous among them is that someone known to you to like the chocolate/peanut butter combination tells you that they don’t like chocolate peanut butter fudge. Of course, that must be a joke, you think. Wrong. It turns out that it’s possible to simultaneously be a person who puts peanut butter and chocolate on their breakfast and a person who doesn’t like it when there’s peanut butter in their chocolate fudge. Fortunately, if you make this recipe for such a person, you can ditch the peanut butter and put the chocolate in at the same time as the vanilla. They will be delighted.

The other problems are a bit more pedestrian. First, undercooking. If you don’t get the sugar hot enough, it won’t ever thicken no matter how much you stir it. Fortunately, if this happens, you can add some water and put the whole mixture back on the stove until it gets to the correct temperature. No ingredients wasted, but it makes the process take an extra hour (plus whatever time you spent fruitlessly stirring).

Second, over-stirring. If you mix this in a stand mixer, and don’t stop soon enough, you’ll end up with a very delicious pile of crumbs. It’s still tasty, and I’m led to believe that if this happens it can be re-smoothified by heating in a double boiler. I haven’t tried it; crumbly is fine with me.

If you don’t have a stand mixer handy, or you want really strong forearms, you can mix this with a spoon. The risk of over-mixing goes down substantially, but it’s a lot more work. If you go this route, be sure to let it cool a lot (110°F / 43°C, the pot should feel like it’s a little warmer than room temperature) before you start stirring. Mine took about an hour to get cool enough. As soon as it loses its gloss or starts to thicken, you can add the chocolate and pour it into the pan. It’s a lot easier to notice that it’s thickening when stirring by hand.

Tips

I like dark chocolate for this kind of thing. There’s already a ton of sugar, and fudge even has milk. I used the same chocolate that I used for the meringue cookies and it came out pretty good.

The pot this boils in needs to be considerably bigger than the ingredients alone would suggest. Do not use a small saucepan, or this will boil right over. If you can cover the pot while it’s boiling and still see the temperature, it’ll save you a good amount of cleaning sticky stuff off your stove.

The temperature will hover at around 220°F for a while before it climbs up to soft ball. You can use this fact to check your thermometer’s calibration. If it’s been within a tenth of a degree for more than a minute, it’s probably around here. I’m pretty sure this is the water all boiling off. It’s above the normal boiling point for water for the same reason salt water boils at a higher temperature.

Story

Lots of recipes on the Internet have folksy stories that go along with them. This isn’t much, but it doesn’t hurt to share. When I was a kid in New England, we’d sometimes go out to get fudge. There were shops that only sold fudge, in all sorts of different flavors, and we’d get samplers of different varieties. My parents called it fuh-duh-juh, with 3 syllables.

The first time I tried making this, I had undercooked it. I was also stirring by hand. I had waited for it to get plenty cool enough, but after 40 minutes of stirring with no hint of losing its gloss, I dumped some (too much) water in it, put it back on the stove, and tried again. At this point, it had the peanut butter and vanilla, but not the chocolate mixed in. I got it to the right temperature this time, let it cool again, and put it into my stand mixer.

I wasn’t sure how much mixing it would take, so I was pulsing it on then checking with a spoon. It didn’t lose its gloss until one time I stopped the mixer and stirred it a little with the spoon. It immediately dulled. I put the chocolate in, and mixed it at very low speed for a little bit longer (too much longer) then crumbled it into my pan that had been sitting there, greased, since I had started this experiment 2 hours earlier.

After I got what I could into the pan, I scraped the mixing bowl a bit and tasted some. It was like being a kid in a fudge shop again.

I got this recipe from my Mom. We used to make it (very) occasionally when I was little.

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[1]

Unless your thermometer’s badly calibrated, and says you’re at 235°F when you’re actually sitting at about 220°F. Then things get interesting.

[2]

You can put the chocolate in at the same time as the peanut butter if you wish. This will result in smoother fudge without any chunks of chocolate. It’s also a bit easier to do reliably with the stand mixer.

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