Made my first fudge!

So in a previous post I had stated a goal of making fudge for improving my skills as a baker / confectioner. Today I have achieved that goal!

I used this recipe and it wasn’t overly difficult. It took a lot of time as heating up 400 grams of sugar, milk and an entire tin of condensed milk to boiling takes a while.

However as I write this the fudge is currently cooling on the counter and I have a few observations that I want to make for next time.

Need better tools

Firstly, I want to look at getting some kind of Pan thermometer. One of the issues I ran into was checking the temperature of the mixture while it was boiling on the hob. The recipe mentions a sugar thermometer which I am going to look into as having something that is giving me a constant readout would be very useful.

Hot, hot, hot!

Next observation is that the mixture gets hot and stays hot! By the time I had beaten the fudge and it was pulling away from the pan into a ball I measured the temperature of the fudge. Despite leaving it to sit in the pan for five minutes it was still 120 C! So when I added some chocolate chips as recommended by the recipe they melted! I can see why though people and things like nuts to it because you don’t have that problem.

Narrowly avoided disaster!

One major thing I figured out was not to use my silicone spatula for stirring the mixture while it is on the Boil. Said spatula was fairly cheap and doesn’t have any kind of metal core in it and if I had kept going, I’m pretty sure I would have lost the head in the mixture!

Give yourself room to work

I would have benefited from using a larger saucepan. I only have the one because I don’t use them very often, but the Saucepan I did use was a size too small. At times the mixture was threatening to overflow and difficult to stir because of all the boiling froth.

I have wondered if I could use my enamelled casserole dish instead of a saucepan? It’s much bigger and has taller sides so at least I wouldn’t get burned again!

I will be coming back to making fudge and once I get the basic recipe down I will be looking to explore other additives, methods and flavours.