# How is toffee made?

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## Summary

Toffee is sugar or treacle boiled with butter to the hard crack stage, 149 to 154°C, then poured out to set. Cooked less, it stays chewier.

## Description

Toffee is an English confection made by caramelising sugar or molasses with butter, and occasionally a little flour. Its character depends almost entirely on how hot it is cooked.
Step by step
Melt and dissolve. Sugar or molasses, or treacle, is heated with butter until the sugar dissolves.Boil to hard crack. The mixture is boiled until it reaches the hard crack stage, 149 to 154°C. At this temperature almost all the water has gone: see how are sweets made?Add extras. Nuts or raisins are sometimes stirred in.Pour and set. The hot toffee is poured out to cool and harden, then broken or cut into pieces. Slab toffee was traditionally broken with a small toffee hammer: see slab toffee and the toffee hammer
Where the flavour comes from
As the sugar is heated strongly, it caramelises: it browns and produces new flavour compounds. One of them, diacetyl, has an intense buttery flavour. Caramelisation is a type of non enzymatic browning, like the Maillard reaction, but it happens through heat alone rather than through a reaction with amino acids.
Treacle toffee, made with black treacle, is hard, dark and brittle: see treacle toffee
Hard, chewy and in between
The higher a sugar syrup is cooked, the more concentrated the sugar and the harder the result. So a toffee taken all the way to hard crack is brittle, while butterscotch, made from brown sugar and butter, is boiled only to the soft crack stage: see how is butterscotch made?
Violet Mackintosh of Halifax has been credited with changing what the British meant by toffee. In 1890 she and her husband John opened a sweet shop, and her recipe blended traditional hard, brittle English butterscotch with soft American caramel. Sold as Mackintosh's Celebrated Toffee, it was a hit: see John Mackintosh, the toffee king of Halifax
The word
The Oxford English Dictionary dates the first published use of toffee to 1825, as a variant of taffy, first recorded in 1817. Both began as English dialect words.
Our pick and mix includes toffee bonbons and chocolate toffee eclairs.

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