a lot of recipes include the temperature at which you should remove your product from further cooking
does it matter how quickly you get there? i was making something the other day and apparently had the heat too high so it got to the right temperature in about half the time that it normally would. thankfully it did not burn, but the end product wasn’t exactly what i wanted it to be. the texture just wasn’t quite right. so does it matter that i didn’t cook it over medium heat for X number of minutes, even though the final temp was the same?
I assume you’re just talking about the sugar/corn syrup. To the best of my knowledge, it doesn’t matter how long (or short) it takes to get there, just that it gets there, and stops, at the right stage (soft ball, hard ball etc)
My first question is what were you using to test the temperature and have you calibrated it*?
As you cook a sugar syrup, the water boils off and concentrates the sugar. The more water that escapes, the higher the temperature can go. So it shouldn’t really matter how quickly you get to the target temp, as in a way, that temp is really just telling you your sugar to water ratio.
I am betting, however, that the issue is the thermometer and you simply undercooked or overcooked the sugar.
*Stick it in boiling water for several minutes to verify that it reads 100C/212F. If it reads high or low, you can mentally adjust the temp to cook it to.
I use an instant read thermometer (ThermoWorks) and it didn’t occur to me that it might need calibration, so that’s something I’ll look into when I get home. Thanks for the tip!
There were a few other things going on, i.e. lots of humidity, possibly sub-par ingredients, etc. so I’m trying to narrow it down bit by bit.
I suspect the final temperature spec assumes a uniform temp throughout the entire mixture. If you’re applying extreme heat to the bottom of the pan, it may not be possible to maintain that condition; ISTM you could burn the mixture at the bottom before your thermometer hits the target temp.
I think you could probably heat it quickly at the outset, reducing the stove power as you get closer to the target temp so that you can keep it adequately stirred to avoid burning anything on the bottom of the pan.
If by ‘instant read’ you’re talking about an IR thermometer, remember that it’s only reading the surface temp, so you have to be sure to stir it really well before using that. You’re probably better off getting an actual candy thermometer.
This is also what I think. The heat from the stove doesn’t move through everything in the pot instantaneously. If the heat is too high, the stuff on the bottom can burn while the stuff on the top is hardly warm. This happens with normal cooking as well. If you heat up some tomato sauce with a high heat, the bottom will burn and the top will still be cool. So I’m guessing that the sugar on the bottom got much higher than whatever the desired temperature was.
I believe the field of mathematics which deals with this is partial differential equations. Those kinds of equations are used to calculate how quickly heat moves through a material.
It might have continued to cook a bit after you took it off the heat. Do as suggested: slow down the cooking as you approach the target temperature. (It only takes a slight change in temperature to make a big difference in the result.)