Salt water taffy
Having traveled to many beach towns, cities by the ocean and the likes, I have had many tastes of these sticky confections. My favorite flavors being licorice and cinnamon.
I love the thought that they have stayed simple and pretty much unchanged since their beginning.
After reading many conflicting ideas about how it came to be I found this article and found it to be the most informative with pictures and the likes
to help explain the ooey, gooey, sticky process.
Whether you visit San Francisco, Morro Bay, Pismo beach that are here in my home state
or somewhere else in the US that sells nostalgia candy ,stop and try a few pieces..
Who are we kidding you'll want to take away a bag so you have some for later. Possibly even to share :)
full article here...
We Found The Salt In Salt Water Taffy
By Julie R. Thomson
One could safely assume that people head to the beach for the sun and the sand, but we’re willing to bet most are in it for the foods that go along with spending a day aside the ocean. Fish tacos, lobster rolls, ice cream cones and salt water taffy — these are the eats that make the beach so alluring.
Salt water taffy wouldn’t even exist if it weren’t for the beach. While its origins are muddled, popular candy legend credits a shop on the Atlantic City boardwalk for its beginnings. One night, the store was flooded with ocean water and the candy stock soaked. When cleaning up the next morning, a young girl walked in asking for taffy and the clerk responded with an offering of salt water taffy as a joke. The girl took it, loved it, and salt water taffy was born.
Salt water taffy begins as sugar, evaporated milk, corn syrup and flavorings that bubble into a stretchy, chewy, melt-in-your mouth candy we love — after much cooling, pulling, stretching and more stretching, that is. Once the mixture has come to a boil and reached the right temperature, it’s poured onto a prepared surface, folded onto itself to cool, and salted. Then comes the hard part. The pulling and stretching is what turns this sticky mess into that light and airy candy that we know as taffy — and it’s this very process that makes it a recipe most sane people wouldn’t attempt at home. To make really good taffy, you need a lot of air (ahem, a lot of pulling) and only machines are really good at that. That’s why we leave to the professionals.
Despite its name, many salt water taffy manufacturers no longer add salt to their taffy (if they ever did) — not even the original producers in Atlantic City. And many use artificial flavors and colors to match. We suspect that’s why this candy isn’t more popular at the beach. So if you’re wondering where all the salt in salt water taffy went, we found it in the heart of Brooklyn, NY.
