How to Pull Taffy

Old-fashioned salt water taffy is a staple of candy shops, which often feature taffy being repeatedly pulled on a large metal machine in the window. Salt water taffy does not contain ocean water and can be made at home. In order for it to achieve its light, chewy texture, taffy must be aerated, a process of incorporating air bubbles throughout the candy. You can make taffy at home and pull it with your hands to achieve the correct taste. This article will show you how to pull taffy to the perfect consistency.


STEPS ON HOW TO PULL TAFFY:

1. Make your taffy.

2. Let the taffy stand until it is cool enough throughout to touch with your fingers.

3. Wash your hands thoroughly, then butter them. Pick up the taffy with 2 hands. Form the taffy into a ball.

4. Pull your right and left hands away from each other sideways in front of your body. (You will be pulling taffy for quite a while, so find a comfortable position or friends to help).

5. Double the taffy on itself by bringing the ends together on the left side and pulling the middle with your right hand.

If you plan on making a lot of taffy, invest in a taffy hook. They are available through online kitchen stores. Install this large metal hook on your wall, clean it, and then hook the taffy around the middle, and pull. Double the taffy on the hook. Pull and repeat. This allows you to pull back and use momentum to help you, making it less exhausting.
Regrease your hands with butter as needed throughout the process of pulling.

6. Pull the taffy until it is light in color and stiff. This will indicate there are enough air bubbles inside to make it fluffy. Pulling taffy can take 15 to 60 minutes, depending upon the number of people you have pulling and the amount of taffy you are working with.

7. Pull hard on 1 end of the taffy so that it is stretched into a thin rope. You may need to take it between your 2 palms and rotate your hands back and forth to keep the round rope shape. Cut the taffy with clean, greased scissors and wrap the taffy in wax paper.

8. Twist together ropes of different colors and flavors to form a striped candy. Cut with greased scissors and wrap in wax paper squares.

Taffy Overview

With a history that spans back for centuries, the taffy is a candy that contains two of the flavors that are most basic: fat (usually butter, but sometimes they use vegetable oil instead) and sugar.

Mixing the butter and the sugar aren’t the only things you need to do, if you want to make taffy. These ingredients should be boiled together, making a sticky and thick mass. After that mass of butter and sugar is created, you have to stretch it and pull it for a long period of time. In the past, this mass would’ve been stretched manually, an activity that took hours. These days, a special taffy machine is used to pull it. This machine has three bars, which spin around, pulling the taffy candy. Since the taffy is pulled automatically, a lot of effort and time is saved, so more taffy is produced, at a lower cost. Some candy shops have these machines, so you might’ve seen them at some point, while you walked past these stores.

Salt water taffy is something that you probably heard about. The origin of this type of taffy is the city of Atlantic City, from New Jersey. Despite its name, and of what most people believe, this type of taffy doesn’t have salt water in it.

There are a number of stories that try to explain why salt water taffy has this name. A story that is popular, tells how Bradley David, a store owner, had a flood in his building. As a result, all his normal taffy got soaked by the water from the ocean. A customer came inside later and asked for taffy. Bradley answered that he only had some salt water taffy. It sounded good to the client, so he bought it anyway. The name remained in use ever since. Whether the story is true or not is not known, but it’s a nice little story.

These days, taffy is made out of butter, corn syrup and glycerin, but a few of the commercial brands prefer to use palm oil, replacing the butter with it. Laffy Taffy and Airheads are two of these companies that don’t use butter.

You will not find taffy outside the US, at least not easy. While similar candy might exist in other candies, they will have names like Now and Later, Chewits or Starburst, and not taffy.

Airhead is a taffy variety that is very popular. You can make a nice trick with them that I’m going to explain here. You might’ve noticed that the Airhead taffy comes in a paper sleeve made out of cellophane. While it’s unopened, pinch the end of the cellophane sleeve, while you’re flapping the candy. Do the motion, up and down, and you will notice that the Airhead taffy gets smaller. It will continue to get smaller, and as it does this, you might want to move the hand on the wrapper, so a bit of tension is maintained between the candy and the fingers. If you continue to do this movement, in the end you will get a substance that looks like flour, all gathered inside the wrapper.

There are a number of different types of taffy available, like salt water taffy, apple taffy, Turkish taffy and a few others. Usually, home made taffy is used with different methods than commercially available varieties.