How to Have Fantastic Fudge This Easter

Making fudge is one of the hardest things to do, my wife tells me.  I’ve never made it myself, but I sure like to eat it J   Your family probably also enjoys fudge.  Since it’s a great Easter treat, here are some tips to help make your fudge successful (compliments of my wife):

• Have everything ready in advance – lay out your utensils, measure out ingredients, etc.  Once you start cooking, stopping to find a measuring cup could ruin the fudge, so have everything ready.
• Use only real butter. Soft, low-fat substitutes such as margarine of butter-margarine combinations contain extra water, which throws the recipe off and could spell disaster to your fudge.
• Don’t double the recipe.  Success with fudge requires steady control of the heat.  When there are twice as many ingredients, it increases cooking time unpredictably.
• Do cook the fudge s-l-o-w-l-y and cool gradually to 110 degrees before beating.  Otherwise it may become grainy.
• Use a wooden spoon.  Try not to splash the mixture on the sides of the saucepan – this can cause graininess.  One way to prevent the fudge from sticking to the sides of the pan while cooking is by rubbing the sides of the pan with butter.  Stray fudge will slide off the sides as the butter melts during cooking
• Do use a candy thermometer.  Bring your fudge’s cooking temperature between 234 to 240 degrees Fahrenheit – no more, no less for perfect fudge.  Make sure your thermometer is accurate – you’ll know if when you dip it into boiling water it read 212 degrees.  If it’s off, calculate how much you’ll need to add or subtract to your fudge readings to get to 212 degrees.  Also, be sure to place/hang your thermometer on the side of the pan, and not touching the bottom, where it’s too hot.
• Don’t stir anymore after the sugar has dissolved.
• Humidity changes cooking times.  In rainy weather, cook your fudge about 2 degrees higher than normal.  This amounts to about 30 seconds more cooking time.

Good luck and here’s to fantastic fudge!

PS  Feel free to share your favorite fudge recipes. 

Ever burned a cooking pot and tried everything to get the burned food residue off of it to no avail?

A few days ago, my wife badly burned the rice and scorched a cooking pot while cooking dinner.  It looked like she had ruined the pan for good, since no amount of soaking and scrubbing would remove the black burned residue from the pot.  Mind you, this was a piece of expensive, thick stainless steel, copper-bottomed gourmet cooking ware. It would be a shame to throw it out.  And I didn’t want to scrape the stuff off the bottom and ruin the pot.

I remembered somewhere I had read that using oven cleaner would clean the pot. It wouldn’t hurt to try. The instructions said to warm the oven a little first. As this wasn’t an oven but a large saucepan, I heated the pot on low heat just slightly over the stove (not too hot or the cleaner will smoke), then sprayed the cleaner on and left the pot covered overnight.

In the morning, to my astonishment, the stubborn black crust was liquefied and wiped right off the bottom and sides of the pot with nothing more than newspaper. No scrubbing needed. It worked!

So what were the active ingredients in this stuff? I could only find mention of one ingredient – sodium hydroxide, which is lye. Lye is very strong stuff and needs to be handled with care. I normally don’t like using caustic cleaners, but in this case, it was all I could find to save the pot. It’s not to be used on exterior oven surfaces, aluminum, chrome or baked enamel, but it’s fine for porcelain, enamel, iron, stainless steel, ceramic and glass cooking ware.

A word of warning – wear gloves and don’t breath the stuff.  The cleaner was heavily perfumed, probably to mask the lye odor.  But the fragrance was overwhelming in itself.  Spray it on outside and cover the pot quickly before bringing it back indoors.