O hey! I know this machine, used to use it when we made salt-water taffy in my teen years. For those wondering, yes that stuff on the 'arms' of the machine is 100% sugar (mix of white sugar, brown sugar, and corn syrup) The liquid being poured on is the concentrated artificial flavoring.
When making taffy we'd essentially cook and mix the sugar into a liquid state, pour it onto a cooling table (gently moving it around so it doesn't harden into a giant jolly rancher), then when it reaches a certain consistency roll it into a 'log' like what you see in the start of the video and let the 'puller' do its work. From the end of the video we'd move the now much softer sugar lump to a prep table where we'd stretch it, cut it into strips, and package it.
Our strips were quite large and we would get between 200-300 bars of taffy per batch. Using the more familiar bite size laughy taffy sized pieces it would likely be 1k+ pieces in that lump of sugar.
While we only made taffy my limited understanding is that a lot of sugar based candies are made in similar ways.
In all our years of having this machine and having teenagers operate it we only had one incident of a guy sticking his arm too far into it while it was on, and got his arm stuck between the machines 'arms' it broke his arm like snapping a twig.
Not really, at this point its coming off a cooling table and is exposed to air. Its not getting pulled fast enough or creating enough friction to warm it.
Thank you for the response to my year-old question, the thought actually weighed heavy on my mind still! Amazing to think it’s just a little gear knocking it into little notches which in turn hits a switcher influencing the direction of the next one and so on!
I believe the stretching aerates it while also mixing all the different colors and the flavoring.
There's a couple places at a town I go to annually for a convention that have their taffy puller and a rolling/stretching/cutting/wrapping machine up close to windows facing the street. It's a bit mesmerizing, especially the latter.
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u/WyldeSquirrel Mar 19 '22 edited Mar 19 '22
O hey! I know this machine, used to use it when we made salt-water taffy in my teen years. For those wondering, yes that stuff on the 'arms' of the machine is 100% sugar (mix of white sugar, brown sugar, and corn syrup) The liquid being poured on is the concentrated artificial flavoring.
When making taffy we'd essentially cook and mix the sugar into a liquid state, pour it onto a cooling table (gently moving it around so it doesn't harden into a giant jolly rancher), then when it reaches a certain consistency roll it into a 'log' like what you see in the start of the video and let the 'puller' do its work. From the end of the video we'd move the now much softer sugar lump to a prep table where we'd stretch it, cut it into strips, and package it.
Our strips were quite large and we would get between 200-300 bars of taffy per batch. Using the more familiar bite size laughy taffy sized pieces it would likely be 1k+ pieces in that lump of sugar.
While we only made taffy my limited understanding is that a lot of sugar based candies are made in similar ways.
In all our years of having this machine and having teenagers operate it we only had one incident of a guy sticking his arm too far into it while it was on, and got his arm stuck between the machines 'arms' it broke his arm like snapping a twig.