I've had some recent adventures in brittle-making. Not baking per se, it's a component in a
cookie recipe with which I'm absolutely in love, so I've been making it fairly regularly lately. It's interesting to me, especially when using only sugar (no corn syrup), how many ways this seemingly simple thing can go off the rails. The process can be vexing, especially for a non-confectioner like myself.
Here's my basic set of ingredients . . .
Mise En Place
Granulated sugar, water, roasted pecan halves, baking soda & salt, unsalted butter.
I don't think the recipe I use is typical (for one thing, it doesn't call for any corn syrup). I assume this is because it's mainly intended to be used as a component in the cookie recipe. However, from what I can tell, the process is fairly standard. Heat sugar, butter, water and salt in a saucepan, swirling occasionally to combine. To prevent crystallization, avoid stirring. When it reaches ~290F add the nuts and stir to thoroughly combine. Once it reaches 300F -- this temperature is critical to achieve the necessary hard crack stage on the sugar -- add the baking soda, turn off the heat and stir again to combine. From there, pour it out onto a parchment, flatten it out and let it cool.
If you get it right, it'll be a contiguous slab of glossy, nut-studded glory . . .
Pecan Brittle
Left slab with chopped nuts. Right slab with mostly intact halves.
Now, it seems, there are infinite ways to get it wrong and I've found at least a few. Maybe relevant and maybe not, it's only ever gone off the rails for me when I tried to scale up the recipe. That suggests to me that some part(s) of the recipe are not truly scalable (not ruling out use error, though). My guess is that it's the baking soda but tbh, I have no idea. A couple of times I've ended up with this result . . .
Lady Nuts
Not remotely sure what happened here. The only difference between my successful attempts and this one (that I can identify) was the doubling of the recipe. Was that the issue or was it something else that I botched? This looks like crystallization to me but until the baking soda went in, it looked identical to my previous, successful attempts.
Another time, after I experimented with the process by adding the butter later in the cook, I ran into some issues. After a short time, I could smell the butter browning hard and knew I needed to kill the heat before it burned. It hadn't reached 300F, so I knew it wasn't going to be right . . .
Pecan Candy Slab
Unlike the Lady Nuts, this one came out in one piece but the texture is what I'd describe as semi-soft. It's not as silky as a praline (missing the milk component) but it's pretty close. Not gritty, not grainy but certainly not brittle, either.
The silver lining is that even the non-brittles are delicious in their own right. The lady nuts are crunchy and sweet, with a complex roasted finish. They're great out of hand and would be amazing sprinkled on -- or mixed into -- some vanilla ice cream. The slab is also tasty, with a surprisingly pleasant mouthfeel. Still, I don't need pounds of surplus sugary snacks sitting around the house. I'm already making the cookies and that's enough.
Definitely curious about my fails and hoping someone can shed some light on why they might have happened. In the future, I'd like to scale this recipe up without worrying about the outcome.
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