- You have to work with flavors

and smells and touch and sight,

but you also have to hear what's going on.

That balance of all five senses

sort of is a tipping point

where you can do just about anything.

With our candy, we look back in time.

We go back to the 1800s, the Victorian period.

Many of our bits of equipment were made in that time period.

We're pretty much the only one who has started up again,

using this sort of equipment,

tracking it down and restoring it.

Today we're gonna be making sugarplum drop candies,

eggnog image candies, and peppermint candy canes.

First, we do the candy canes.

The first thing we do is we cook the sugar.

It's mixed with water and we're boiling all the water out.

We need to use two sugars

to interrupt the crystallization process,

sucrose and glucose.

If we just used sugar and water, when it hardened,

it would turn back into table sugar, it'd become granular.

- [Uri] Hot pot!

- [Greg] We have a team of five candy makers here

at Lofty Pursuits.

Uri and Jake were working with me today.

Everybody in the store knows when we make peppermint candy

because peppermint has a weird reaction to your skin.

It makes you feel cool.

- [Uri] Anybody who was, in any way, slightly congested

or had any letter of allergies at this point,

they will not after that.

- [Greg] Twenty-five pounds of candy canes

only take less than an ounce of peppermint oil.

When we make candy with multiple colors in it,

we add the food coloring on the table.

We do this so we can segment

and separate the different areas of color.

One of our specialized tools doesn't look like it's a tool.

It's a giant table.

The top is made out of a half-inch piece of steel

and has a water circulation system in it.

We use it to rapidly cool the hot sugar.

Where it comes in contact with the table

will cool off quickly.

But the bits not in contact don't cool that fast.

So, by folding the candy together,

we get to even out the heat

and pick the temperature we want.

We may want it to act more like a liquid

or more like a solid or somewhere in between.

- [Uri] Yeah, we're getting real close to stretch time.

- [Greg] Next, we make the amber sugar white.

This is a hand-wrought iron hook.

It's thicker than most of the other hooks that we encounter.

And this lets it radiate the heat better

so the candy is less likely to stick to the hook.

We have several hooks in the store,

but the one that I used today came from a store

called Mullane's, which was opened in 1848 in Cincinnati.

We changed the amber into white.

We pulled it about 75 times.

Each time we folded it, it trapped air bubbles

on the inside.

Those air bubbles are great

because those little round bubbles reflect light

back out and the random light

that they reflect appears white.

Then we start making the stripes on the heating table.

- [Uri] Make sure my stripes are super even in sickness.

- [Greg] Candy canes didn't always have stripes.

The first candy canes were white.

Actually, if you look at Victorian greeting cards,

which is the best way to look at the history of candy canes,

'cause they showed up on them,

it wasn't until the late 1800s the first stripes came out.

And this is partially because people thought

of peppermint as a white color.

- [Uri] I just wait for these two

to actually get stuck together.

- [Greg] One of the things about candy

that we have to be careful with is the colors

will migrate from one point into another.

In the candy canes, if they're too hot,

the red would actually bleed into the white parts

of the candy.

We don't want this to happen.

We do this by controlling the temperature

and the only way we can really tell the temperature

at this point is by feel.

We know how stiff the candy needs to be.

And that just comes with practice.

- [Uri] Here we come!

- [Greg] The batch roller twists the candy

as it forces it down the taper.

We don't want it to go too far, but it's kinda useful

in this case, to a point, because it puts the spiral

on the candy cane.

- [Uri] The first candy cane is born.

- [Greg] We add a spiral with our hands,

but we do it at the machine first.

Then we add the hook on the candy cane.

The hook on the top of the candy cane is made by bending it.

If you think of this, it's behaving like a tube.

The inside white is softer than the outside,

so we have to bend it very carefully.

We use our hands in a very similar way to a tube bender

that a plumber uses.

Then we have a little guide we use

to make sure they're all a consistent size.

And that's how we make candy canes.

Next, we'll make the drop candy.

[candy shatters]

We start the process the same,

boiling the sugar and adding the flavor.

The sugarplum is a drop candy where everything

is the same color.

Everything else we did used multiple colors.

Because of this, we could cheat a little.

We could add the coloring and the flavoring

in the pot at the same time.

- [Uri] Hot pot!

- [Greg] And when we poured it on the table,

we could pour it thinner and over a larger surface area

so it'll cool faster.

It just speeds up the candy making process.

We can tell by the texture of the sugar

the temperature of the sugar

and then we add the citric acid

'cause citric acid will burn if the sugar's too hot.

And the citric acid is the acid

that makes the flavors right.

Most of these flavors come with no acid in them

and most fruits have acid in it.

- [Uri] Just gets impossibly thin.

- [Greg] The problem with teaching candy making

is it's all about touch.

[hands clap]

The consistency changes constantly.

There's one point that we wanna cut it.

We wanna cut it when the outside is hard

and the inside's still liquid

so we can average out the temperatures.

- [Uri] You can see it's starting

to become a little bit more compact.

- [Greg] But then when we wanna manipulate it,

we want it more of a clay consistency

when we're doing the initial shape,

but we want it to get harder to keep the shapes

once it's done.

It went from a liquid to now it's behaving

like a non-Newtonian fluid.

And that means that right now it's flowing like a liquid,

but if you put a lot of pressure in it,

it would behave like a solid.

I still have a pair of scissors from my great-grandfather

when he was a tailor and they probably

took two weeks of salary to buy,

but he kept them for a lifetime

and he died before I was born.

The things that I own here for this candy making,

I don't feel like I'm an owner of,

I'm just a caretaker of, because they're gonna be here

generations after me and I have to preserve them

for the candy makers that follow me.

This is 150 year old equipment.

The machine is a fruit drop roller.

We're doing this by passing the candy through it

and getting out the shape at the other end.

Today, we use the diamond shape.

The diamond candy not only looks pretty,

but gives eight surfaces to be in your mouth

so the flavor spreads faster.

So we like this for subtle flavors like the sugarplum.

These candy machines haven't changed much

in the last 150 years.

They were developed by Thomas Mills & Brothers

in Philadelphia.

These machines are made out of cast iron.

They weigh 20 or 30 pounds each

and the rollers are solid bronze.

Everything needs to be non-stick on this

and, like a cast iron skillet,

we've made a non-stick by working in oil to the surface.

- [Uri] I'm gonna pre-cool some chunks over here.

- [Greg] The candy comes out of the machine

onto the candy cooling table.

Water is being sprayed on the underside of the top.

Can't have water on the candy, would make it sticky.

This freezes the candy in place

as soon as it comes out of the machine.

The rollers get it into the shape,

but it's the table itself that cools it off.

We slide it across the table when it's still behaving

about the consistency of shoe leather.

It's not rock-hard yet.

The sheet of candy comes out connected by sugar,

which we call flash.

The flash holds the candy together

when it comes to the machine,

but now we need to get rid of it.

We need to break the pieces apart.

And we do that by dropping the candy.

[candy shatters]

The last thing we have to do is get rid

of all the sugar dust, the remnants of the flash.

We have to do this because the candy, under its own weight,

just like glass to a certain point,

will fuse back to itself.

Various candy makers use different things.

I just use an old fryer that we bought for this purpose.

And that's how we make drop candies.

Finally, we'll make the eggnog cut rock image candy.

We start the process the same,

boiling the sugar and adding the flavor.

- [Uri] Hot pot!

- [Greg] I call it image candy,

the correct term is cut rock.

It was originally invented in Blackpool, England.

It's also sometimes called Blackpool Rock.

- [Uri] Mmm, smells like pink.

- [Greg] Blackpool rock is sold in a big piece

with the art all the way through,

like a stick of rock, they call it.

What we're doing is we're taking it to bite-sized pieces,

which is the cut rock part.

Okay, then, let's go. Let's go and get it.

The metal of the equipment's important.

All of our metal is mild steel, not stainless.

Stainless steel, because of the very nature

that makes it not rust, is not magnetic.

Sugar likes to stick to things

that are the same temperature as it.

And the table, if it heats up,

will become sticky to the candy,

the bars, if they heat up too much,

will become sticky to the candy.

With the image candy present, we needed the inside

to be cold because we needed to keep the detail in place.

I say we should move 'em to the table right about now.

- [Uri] I was gonna say, my piece is good.

I don't know if yours is.

- [Greg] Mine's a little hot, but we have time to cool it.

And I did this by cooling off the corners of the presents.