Pâte à Sucre and Sugar Work — The Temperature Stages and the Veil

Sugar work — the manipulation of cooked sugar into pulled, blown, cast, and spun forms — reached its peak as a pastry art form in the nineteenth century under Carême, who built extraordinary sugar and marzipan sculptures (pièces montées) for the tables of Napoleon and the Tsar. It nearly disappeared in the twentieth century as restaurant service moved away from grand table spectacle. It has revived in competition patisserie, where sugar work is a judged category, and in high-end pastry boutiques that use pulled sugar flowers and spun sugar nests as finishing elements.

Sugar work begins with cooking sucrose (or isomalt — a sugar alcohol derived from beet sugar that is more resistant to humidity and more workable at lower temperatures) through a sequence of stages defined by temperature and water content. Each stage has a name, a temperature, and a sensory test that has been transmitted through apprenticeship for three centuries. The stages: thread (105–110°C), soft ball (112–116°C), firm ball (118–121°C), hard ball (121–130°C), soft crack (132–143°C), hard crack (149–154°C), caramel (155–170°C). At hard crack, pulled sugar is possible. At caramel, the Maillard reaction produces colour and bitter notes.

• Sugar sculpting traditions exist across Asia independently: Chinese dragon beard candy (a pulled sugar confection producing hundreds of very thin threads from a single mass of cooked glucose syrup) us
• Turkish çekme helva (pulled sesame sweet) uses the same pulling motion to create a fibrous texture from cooked sesame paste and sugar
• Japanese ame-zaiku (street art sugar sculptures of animals made from cooked and pulled rice sugar) is a separate tradition of extraordinary delicacy