Confectionery

Confectionery is related to food items that are rich in sugar and often referred to as a confection. Confectionery refers to the art of creating sugar based dessert forms. Traditional confectionery goes back to ancient times, and continued to be eaten through the Middle Ages into the modern era.

Modern usage may include substances rich in artificial sweeteners as well. The words candy (US and Canada), sweets (UK and Ireland), and lollies (Australia and New Zealand) are also used for the extensive variety of confectionery.

Generally, confections are low in micronutrients but rich in calories.

Some of the categories and types of confectionery include the following:

Caramels: Derived from a mixture of sucrose, glucose syrup, and milk products. The mixture does not crystallize, thus remains tacky.

Chocolates: Bite-sized confectioneries generally made with chocolate.

Divinity: A nougat-like confectionery based on egg whites with chopped nuts.

Dragée: Sugar-coated almonds and other types of sugar panned candy.

Fondant: Prepared from a warm mixture of glucose syrup and sucrose, which is partially crystallized. The fineness of the crystallites results in a creamy texture.

Fudge: Made by boiling milk and sugar to the soft-ball stage. In the US, it tends to be chocolate-flavored.

Halvah: Confectionery based on tahini, a paste made from ground sesame seeds.

Hard sweets: Based on sugars cooked to the hard-crack stage. Examples lollipops, lemon drops, candy canes, rock candy, etc.

Ice cream: Frozen, flavoured cream, often containing small pieces of chocolate, fruits and/or nuts.

Jelly candies: Including those based on sugar and starch, pectin, gum, or gelatin such as Turkish delight (lokum).

Marzipan: An almond-based confection, doughy in consistency, served in several different ways

Candy, also called sweets or lollies, is a confection that features sugar as a principal ingredient. The category, called sugar confectionery, encompasses any sweet confection, including chocolate, chewing gum, and sugar candy. Vegetables, fruit, or nuts which have been glazed and coated with sugar are said to be candied.

Physically, candy is characterized by the use of a significant amount of sugar, or, in the case of sugar-free candies, by the presence of sugar substitutes.

Candy is made by dissolving sugar in water or milk to form a syrup, which is boiled until it reaches the desired concentration or starts to caramelize. Candy comes in a wide variety of textures, from soft and chewy to hard and brittle, and the texture of candy depends on the ingredients and the temperatures that the candy is processed at.

The final texture of sugar candy depends primarily on the sugar concentration. As the syrup is heated, it boils, water evaporates, the sugar concentration increases, and the boiling point rises. A given temperature corresponds to a particular sugar concentration. These are called sugar stages. In general, higher temperatures and greater sugar concentrations result in hard, brittle candies, and lower temperatures result in softer candies. Once the syrup reaches 171 °C (340 °F) or higher, the sucrose molecules break down into many simpler sugars, creating an amber-colored substance known as caramel. This should not be confused with caramel candy, although it is the candy's main flavoring.

Sunflower “halva” is a popular and widely enjoyed confectionery product specific to the countries of Eastern Europe. Conventional halva has historically been produced from sesame seeds in the Middle East and Northern Africa. However, in the production of halva in Eastern Europe, sesame seeds have been largely replaced by sunflower seeds, due to the high availability of sunflower in this region and the comparable taste of the final product. Oil separation and storage techniques must be perfected if sunflower halva is to fulfill its promise of becoming a cost effective alternative to sesame seed halva on a worldwide scale.

The manufacturing process for sunflower halva type products is presented in figure 1 and consists of the following main stages:

– cleaning and sorting sunflower seeds;

– tahini preparation;

– soapwort extract and cooked sugar preparation;

– halva mass preparation;

– processing of halva mass.