Why do you pull taffy?

The final important step in making taffy is pulling it: Stretching it out and folding it in half, then stretching and folding again, over and over, until you may reach the point of exhaustion.

Good exercise—but what does it do for the candy? As it turns out, pulling taffy aerates it, or incorporates many tiny air bubbles throughout the candy. This makes it lighter and chewier.

Taffy isn’t the only candy out there that gets pulled this way. We saw molten lollipop pulled by a machine at a local lollipop factory. In this case, the air bubbles added by pulling were to make the candy less rock hard and more brittle.