What is the difference between fudge and toffee?

Fudge and toffee look like close cousins: both are golden brown, and both are made from sugar and butter. But the way they are cooked makes them almost opposites.

Side by side

| | Fudge | Toffee | |---|---|---| | Main ingredients | Sugar, butter and milk | Sugar or molasses and butter, occasionally flour | | Cooked to | Soft ball, about 112 to 116°C | Hard crack, 149 to 154°C | | After cooking | Cooled to about 48°C, then beaten | Poured out to cool and set | | Structure | Tiny sugar crystals | No crystals, smooth throughout | | Texture | Soft, creamy, cuts cleanly | Hard and brittle, or chewy if cooked less |

The temperature

The hotter a sugar syrup is cooked, the more water boils away and the harder the finished sweet. Fudge stops at the soft ball stage, about 112 to 116°C, where plenty of moisture remains. Toffee goes all the way to the hard crack stage, 149 to 154°C, where very little is left, so it sets hard: see how are sweets made?

The crystals

This is the bigger difference. Fudge is cooled to about 48°C and then beaten until it is thick, creamy and less glossy. Beating makes a great many tiny sugar crystals form, and those crystals give fudge its soft, short texture: see how is fudge made? Toffee is the other kind of sweet. Food scientists class toffees, like boiled sweets and caramels, as non crystalline: smooth all the way through, whether chewy or hard, with no crystals at all: see how is toffee made?

Soft toffee is still toffee

Not all toffee is hard. Toffees cooked to lower temperatures stay chewier. In 1890 John Mackintosh of Halifax made his name by blending hard butterscotch with soft caramel to make a chewy toffee: see John Mackintosh, the toffee king of Halifax. Even so, soft toffee is not fudge, because it is not beaten into crystals.

Where they came from

Toffee is an English confection; the word first appears in print in 1825, as a variation of taffy. Modern fudge comes from the 19th century United States. It was a craze at American women's colleges: a Vassar College student wrote of buying fudge in Baltimore in 1886, and claimed to have introduced it to Vassar in 1888. In Britain, though, communities in the Midlands and Cornwall had long made local versions of Scottish tablet, which came to be called fudge by the 1890s. Cornish fudge traces its origins to the 18th century, when confectioners began using clotted cream instead of milk: see Devon fudge and what is the difference between fudge and tablet?

Try both

Our pick and mix includes Vanilla Fudge Cubes and Toffee Bonbons. Each card opens up to show the ingredients and allergens, so you can check them before you choose. For the third member of the family, see what is the difference between toffee and caramel?

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