Chapter 10 Further Reading

Beginner

Stella Parks, BraveTart: Iconic American Desserts (2017). A working pastry chef's deep dive into the candies and desserts of American baking, with detailed treatment of caramels, fudges, brittles, and meringue-sugar work. Practical, well-tested recipes paired with clear chemistry explanations. The fudge and caramel chapters in particular are a friendly entry point for the home cook who wants to graduate from following recipes to understanding them.

Kenji López-Alt, "Why Hot Fudge Sundae Toppings are Always Wrong" and other caramel-related posts at Serious Eats (ongoing). López-Alt has written extensively about caramel and candy chemistry in plain language, with side-by-side experimental comparisons. Free, searchable, and frequently updated. Good for a specific kitchen problem ("why did my caramel seize?") rather than systematic learning.

Helen Rennie, "Caramel — Wet vs. Dry Method" (YouTube, 2019). A 12-minute video walkthrough of both classical caramel methods with clear visual cues for each stage. Rennie's narration is precise and unhurried; this is one of the few caramel videos that actually shows the transition from amber to burnt at real time, which most cooking shows edit out.

Intermediate

Harold McGee, On Food and Cooking (2nd ed., 2004), Chapter 12 (Sugars, Chocolate, and Confectionery). The canonical reference. McGee's treatment of sucrose chemistry, candy temperatures, caramelization, and confectionery is thorough, well-cited, and accessible to a motivated layperson. Read this chapter if you want one definitive resource on everything in this chapter and several adjacent chapters.

Shirley Corriher, CookWise (1997) and BakeWise (2008). Corriher is a former biochemist who became a cooking teacher; her books explain candy chemistry with the eye of a working chef. BakeWise in particular has detailed troubleshooting for fudge, caramel, brittle, and meringue-based candies that complements McGee with more recipe-oriented coverage.

Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (1985). A historical anthropologist's account of how sugar moved from rare luxury to ubiquitous commodity, including the human cost of the Atlantic slave trade in producing sugar for European markets. Not a chemistry book, but indispensable context for any cook who wants to think honestly about where their ingredients come from. Cited in this chapter's history sidebar.

Advanced

B. L. Wedzicha, "Chemistry of Browning Reactions" in Caramel: Cooking and Crafting with Sugar, ed. Carole Bloom (2013), or the same author's contributions to Belitz et al., Food Chemistry (5th ed., 2009). For food science students, Wedzicha is one of the leading researchers on the chemistry of caramelization and Maillard reactions. His treatments cover the kinetics, the intermediate compounds, and the structure-activity relationships of the brown polymers that give caramel and Maillard products their color.

Owen R. Fennema (ed.), Fennema's Food Chemistry (5th ed., 2017). A graduate-level food chemistry textbook with rigorous treatment of carbohydrate chemistry, browning reactions, and confectionery science. The chapter on carbohydrates is dense but rewards the student who has had a year of organic chemistry. Available in many university libraries.

Modernist Cuisine (Myhrvold, Bilet et al.), Vol. 4 Ingredients and Preparations (2011). The molecular gastronomy reference. Treatment of caramelization, sugar work, isomalt, and modernist confectionery is thorough and beautifully illustrated. The price is prohibitive for most home libraries, but it's worth requesting through an interlibrary loan if you want to see how contemporary high-end pastry chefs are pushing sugar chemistry.

For Educators

ChemMatters magazine (American Chemical Society), various caramel and confectionery articles. ChemMatters is the ACS's high-school chemistry magazine, and over the years has published several accessible articles on candy chemistry that map well to AP Chemistry curricula. Free archives are available on the ACS website. Pat Hammond keeps a folder of these.

The Exploratorium's "Science of Cooking" website (exploratorium.edu/cooking). A free educational resource with classroom-friendly demonstrations of crystallization, supersaturation, and the candy-temperature ladder. The "Sugar and Sweets" section in particular has well-tested classroom labs adapted for school safety constraints. A useful complement to this textbook for high-school teachers.