[Sca-cooks] The Cold Water Candy Test

[Gaylin Walli]

I was rooting around for an explanation to send to someone about the  
various candying stages of sugar syrup and happened upon a great set  
of videos at The Exploratorium website that I thought cooks  
(especially new ones) might find useful.  You'll need either  
Quicktime, a Flash player, or Real Vido, but these short clips really  
capture what you're looking for when testing syrup for candying:

http://www.exploratorium.edu/cooking/candy/sugar-stages.html

We're making Halwa from the Kitab al-Tibakha (14th C Bagdad) for the  
Spring Coronation feast here in the MK and I thought that some of the  
feast staff might find this useful for understanding what we were  
aiming for. Then I realized maybe a lot of *other* people might find  
it useful too.

Enjoy,

Iasmin

PS: Check out the rest of the website too. It's a really nicely done  
site.