As my coworkers and I were digging through the bowls of leftover Halloween candy, I started to wonder if, and how, candy goes bad.
I’m picturing a big bowl of candy in an office setting. The candies are in their individually sealed pouches. Artificial lighting, steady temperature and humidity. Below are some of the various pieces you’ll find:
-Snickers bar
-3 Musketeers bar
-Whoppers
-Gold Coins (pure chocolate shaped and wrapped to look like a coin)
-Butterscotch Disks (hard candy)
-Dum Dum Suckers
-Jawbreakers (individually wrapped)
-Laffy Taffy (individually wrapped)
One of my coworkers said that chocolate will turn white when it goes bad. I’m a little skeptical of that. I can imagine chocolate can turn due to heat and maybe time, but in a controlled setting this this how long will it last? I can’t picture the hard candies going bad. I have noticed though after a long period the become “sticky” and sometimes deformed on the outside, usually with the Dum-Dum suckers. I assumed it has something to do with heat/time as well. I can’t imagine the wrapped jawbreakers going bad at all. I’m not sure what to think about taffy.
What do you know or have experienced? With hard candy, I don’t care how long it has been. If it’s still wrapped, I’m eating it.
I happen a mug containing some 4 year-old candy on my desk (it’s a long story). I just partially unwrapped one of the peanut butter cups. They aren’t white, but they are crumbly and smell a bit musty. There are also some peppermint star hard candy which looks and smells as good as new. I’m not brave enough to try any of them.
White on chocolate is just cocoa butter migrating to the surface. It’s not a sign of something wrong. And for most wrapped candies, I wouldn’t worry about them going bad within a 2-3 year span. Hard candies are probably fine for longer than that.
If they don’t smell off, they really should be okay.
My husband and I got a covered crystal candy dish as a wedding gift (ah, great-aunts, dontcha love 'em?) and filled it with starlight mints, those red and white peppermint pinwheel hard candies. Somehow it migrated into a cupboard and stayed there for at least 5 years, probably closer to 10. When we moved and found the candy dish, the mints had slumped and fused into a bowl-shaped mass of flavored sugar and cellophane. We had no air conditioning in that house for the first 7 years we lived there, so YMMV.
The white coating on chocolate is called “bloom” and is not the optimal state of chocolate but won’t do any harm.
There is a difference between “chocolate that has gone bad (as in harmful to eat” and “chocolate that has been lying around at less-than-optimal temps. for half a year, so that the white has formed on the surface and is still good to eat, but tastes far less good than fresh chocolate”.
Hard candy gets a sticky outer film on it. Especially in hot humid summers. It can get pretty nasty after a couple years. I store my Werther’s in the fridge because they can get sticky in just a few summer months.
I just bought some mini Baby Ruths that were on sale. They must be a little old because they are tough to bite into. Hard to chew. Caramel gets stiffer with age.
That’s from page 565 of the 1975 edition. It does not explain what causes cocoa butter to resist rancidity, but it’s clear that it has some preservative value in chocolate that’s been properly stored in a cool, dry place … I’ve seen some suggestions around the web that cocoa butter never goes rancid, but this seems doubtful .
Chocolate treats constitute a subset of candy, dialectically speaking. However, not all chocolate is candy, and not all candy is chocolate.
For example, any kind of chocolate bits sold next to the register – in bar or morsel form – or the chocolates that come in boxes of assortments – are candy. Chocolate fudge is candy.
However, chocolate in powdered, beverage, syrup, pastry, cake, pie, ice cream, or unsweetened chunk form is not candy.
it migrated into a cupboard and stayed there for at least 5 years, probably closer to 10. When we moved and found the candy dish, the mints had slumped and fused into a bowl-shaped mass of flavored sugar and cellophane. We had no air conditioning in that house for the first 7 years we lived there, so YMMV.
