Calorie-free Rock Candy

Form and texture
Rock candy: Rock candy is crystallized sugar formed by allowing a supersaturated sugar solution to cool and crystallize onto a string or stick. It results in large, individual sugar crystals that are typically larger and coarser than granulated sugar. It often comes on a stick or in larger crystalline formations.
Granulated sugar: Granulated sugar, also known as table sugar or white sugar, is the most common type of sugar used in households. It consists of fine, small sugar crystals that are uniform in size. Granulated sugar is what most people use for sweetening beverages, baking, and cooking due to its easy dissolvability.

Processing method
Rock candy: The process of making rock candy involves allowing a hot sugar-water solution to cool slowly, promoting the formation of large crystals. Often, seeds or strings are used to encourage crystal growth.
Granulated sugar: Granulated sugar is refined and processed from sugar cane or sugar beets. It undergoes various stages of refining and purification to produce the small, uniform crystals found in typical household sugar.

Usage
Rock candy: Rock candy is commonly used as a sweet treat or candy. It's often enjoyed as a hard, crystalline confectionery and can be flavored or colored for variety.
Granulated sugar: Granulated sugar is a versatile sweetener used in various culinary applications. It's used for sweetening beverages, baking, cooking, and as a general-purpose sweetener in a wide range of recipes.

Stir the syrup with a spoon or a spatula. Stirring prevents the sugar crystals that start to form from growing too big. In general, a crystal grows from a "crystal seed," which is a clump of sucrose molecules, a speck of dust, or a gas bubble. Stirring causes the sucrose molecules to be pushed into one another, forming crystal seeds throughout the syrup. The resulting crystals will be smaller when more of the crystal seeds are present, because the sucrose molecules can join any of a larger number of crystal seeds.

If you want to make fudge, first heat the syrup to a temperature above the boiling point of water (100 oC), and then pour it into a pan to make the syrup cool down faster. The reason the syrup needs to cool quickly is that sucrose molecules do not have time to form enough intermolecular interactions to grow into large crystals. Some of them will form crystal seeds, but most of the sucrose molecules won't interact with one another. By contrast, if the syrup were to cool slowly, the sucrose molecules would have time to arrange themselves in larger crystals.

After the syrup cools down to 50 oC, you can start stirring or scraping it. It is important to let the fudge cool down to 50 oC because if you stir during this cooling phase, crystal seeds will probably form too soon and, as a result, they may crystallize out of the solution, and the texture of the fudge would be grainy. The syrup actually becomes supersaturated, similar to what happened to the syrup used to make rock candy-the syrup contains more sucrose molecules than can stay dissolved.

As you stir the fudge, many crystals form at once, and the stirring helps the sucrose molecules bind to one another and start forming small crystals. The main goal is to keep stirring continuously, which generates a larger number of small crystals. As the temperature decreases further, the sucrose molecules spread among the many crystal seeds and bind to any one of them, keeping the size of the crystals small. This creates the rich, melt-in-the mouth texture typical of fudge.

The factory of Sweet Code Health Lab (China) Ltd lies in Gaoqing County of Zibo City, Shandong Province, in the vicinity of S235 provincial highway, 6 kilometers away from the entrance of Jinan-Qingdao Expressway. It enjoys convenient transportation.