Fudge Recipe

How to make it

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• Prepare your square pan by greasing it with butter or lining it with waxed paper.
• Mix together chocolate, sugar, half-and-half, corn syrup, and salt in the saucepan.
• Stir over medium-low heat with a wooden spoon until the chocolate melts and the mixture begins to boil.
• As soon as the syrup starts to boil, stop stirring and clip the candy thermometer to the side of the saucepan, being careful not to let it touch the bottom.
• Let the syrup cook, undisturbed, until it reaches the soft-ball stage, about 235° F–240° F.
• While it cooks, wash down the sides of the saucepan with a pastry brush dipped in a small amount of warm water to loosen and dissolve any sugar crystals clinging to the sides.
• Carefully remove the saucepan from the heat and let the mixture rest, undisturbed.
• Let it cool to approximately 110° F.
• At this point, a slight skin should have formed on the top.
• Be patient—this may take a while!
• (Alternatively, you may pour the mixture onto a marble slab at this point and allow it to cool on the slab—this is the way that professionals make fudge.)
• Add the vanilla and butter and begin to stir with a wooden spoon.
• (If you are adding nuts or dried fruit, add them just before the mixture completely loses its gloss.)
• You don’t need to use a lot of force, but you should keep stirring constantly until the fudge “sets up.”
• You will be able to see the mixture gradually change from glossy to dull, lighten in color, and stiffen.
• Again, patience (and a strong arm) is needed—this change can take from 15 to 20 minutes to occur!
• (Be careful not to beat too long or too hard—this can result in a coarse, grainy fudge, as can stirring while the fudge is still too hot.)
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• If you're adding nuts or fruit, you may want to warm them slightly in a microwave before adding them.
• If they are too cold, the temperature difference may “shock” the fudge and cause it to solidify too quickly.
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• Soft-Ball Stage
• 235° F–240° F
• sugar concentration: 85%
• At this temperature, sugar syrup dropped into cold water will form a soft, flexible ball. If you remove the ball from water, it will flatten like a pancake after a few moments in your hand.
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• Did You Know?
• Fudge was invented in the United States around 100 years ago.
• The exact origins are disputed, but all accounts claim that the first batch of fudge was accidentally created by failing to make another type of candy—possibly caramels.
• Many stories also claim that fudge was invented by students at a women’s college—Vassar, Smith, or Wellesley.
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• Why do I add corn syrup?
• Corn syrup acts as an "interfering agent" in this and many other candy recipes.
• It contains long chains of glucose molecules that tend to keep the sucrose molecules in the candy syrup from crystallizing.
• In fudge, the addition of "interfering agents" can be a double-edged sword: you want crystals to form, but not until the cooked mixture has cooled down to a certain degree.
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• Why do I add vanilla?
• Vanilla is often added to chocolate candies or other chocolate recipes because it complements and accents the flavor of chocolate.
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• Why do I need to stop stirring after the syrup begins to boil?
• At this point, you have dissolved the crystal structure of the sugar.
• Stirring or other agitation is one of the many factors that can encourage the fructose and glucose molecules in your syrup to rejoin and form sucrose—crystals of table sugar.
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• Why do I wash down the sides of the pan?
• The sugar crystals are dissolved at this point in the process.
• But a single seed crystal of sugar clinging to the side of the pan might fall in and encourage recrystallization.
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• Why does the fudge need to cool for such a long time?
• The key to a smooth and creamy texture is a fudge that's full of thousands of tiny sugar crystals.
• Heating the syrup to a high temperature and then allowing it to cool, undisturbed, produces a supersaturated solution—this means that the solution contains more sugar molecules than would normally be possible at room temperature.
• A supersaturated solution is highly unstable, and any agitation will cause crystallization to occur throughout the solution.
• If fudge is stirred while it's still hot, fewer crystals form, and they grow larger as the syrup cools, resulting in a coarse, grainy candy.
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• Why is it so important to keep stirring until the fudge "sets"?
• Stirring helps control the size of the sugar crystals that form—it keeps them from growing too large, which would produce gritty fudge.