Can you salvage my Turkish Delight?

December 23, 2015 4:08 PM

I attempted to make Turkish Delight at home for the first time. The first effort was a complete failure. Effort two seemed to be improved but it's not even close to set after 12 hours. Can you tell me how I might salvage it?

I used this recipe that I came across in a cook book of mine. I live in Australia where you can't buy liquid pectin, or even plain powdered pectin, so like an idiot I attempted to substitute this stuff called Jamsetta (which includes sugar and citric acid) designed for, unsurprisingly, setting jam, and while I was at it I stuffed up the flavoring so I ended up with a sour nasty half-set mess, which I threw out.

Then I discovered you can DIY liquid pectin at home with apples so I did that, and used it in round 2 of the recipe. It seemed to be going so well - the pectin and baking soda bubbled up just right! The color and clarity were perfect! The flavor was excellent! And now 12 hours later it's still a sticky liquid.

I have at my disposal a bit more of my home-made pectin, gelatin powder, cream of tarter, and other basics. Can I rescue my current batch with any of that? If so, what ratio and how do I do it? (I know things like candy-making are more chemistry than art, so the more specific the advice, the better)

I care 0 about authenticity. I expect most or all of it to be consumed in the next 24 hours so I don't care much about shelf stability either. Please help me so I can drug young English children into betraying their families and doing my bidding. I mean, eat delicious rosewater-flavored sugar.

posted by olinerd to Food & Drink (9 answers total)

I've seen both liquid & powdered pectin at Coles (at some random spot between the baking, health food, and medicinal isles because, y'know, it's Coles…)

I'd suspect the extra sugars and acids in the Jamsetta & home-made pectin upset the balance & reduced its setting. You could try adding small amounts of gelatin, but that's also going to be affected similarly and you'd have to trial-and-error the amount to hit the right balance between sloppy goop & something with the texture of stiff fridge-dried (Australian) jelly.
posted by Pinback at 4:34 PM on December 23, 2015 [1 favorite]

Best answer: I would try melting it down, adding the rest of your homemade pectin and boiling again but if I wouldn't bet on it working, sorry. Pectin is a tricky bugger.
posted by STFUDonnie at 4:42 PM on December 23, 2015 [1 favorite]

Best answer: It sounds like your home-made pectin wasn't reduced enough, or your apples weren't underripe, which is critical for pectin content. If you add more of this liquid before it's reduced, it's not going to firm up any more than it already has. So add some juice to it (preferably something with a high pectin concentrate, like cranberry or lemon) and start cooking it down. Reduce by at least as much juice as you added. If you use a low-pectin juice, reduce by the amount of liquid pectin you put in.

To test the pectin, pour a little bit of rubbing alcohol into a glass and then drop in a spoonful of cooled pectin. The pectin will coagulate into a jelly-like mass. If this mass can be pulled out with a fork and it forms a heaping gob on the tines, it is concentrated enough to jell perfectly. If it cannot be picked up by the fork in mostly one mass, keep boiling it down. (Note: the alcohol test doesn’t work right if the pectin is hot.)

Once you have the pectin strong enough, use that and some additional sugar and see what happens. If all else fails, stick it in the freezer and blend the resulting frozen gel with some cream and call it a syllabub or something.
posted by ananci at 4:59 PM on December 23, 2015 [3 favorites]

Best answer: If fixing it is too finicky, you can add water to make turkish delight flavored beverages!
posted by aniola at 6:05 PM on December 23, 2015 [3 favorites]

Jamsetta will work - the citric acid is just a preservative, and won't interfere with setting. But. You will need a quite a lot of it to get the texture of turkish delight, which is considerably firmer than jam. Double what you've used already.

If that fails, gelatine, will also work, again, you will want to be quite generous with the quantity. Best of luck.
posted by smoke at 8:07 PM on December 23, 2015

If you add some vodka (vanilla vodka, maybe), I bet Turkish Delight flavoured shooters would be tasty.
posted by pseudostrabismus at 9:21 PM on December 23, 2015 [1 favorite]

7% gelatine by weight will give you a firm gel. Bloom, dissolve in heated 30% of your mixture, whisk in the rest cold and chill too set.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 9:47 PM on December 23, 2015 [1 favorite]

Best answer: No options for the "fixing it" part of your question. Sorry.

Can you incorporate it into awesomely weird museli bars? (Cut into delicate squares if you want to be all posh about it) Use it in an apple pie? Use it as a topping for icecream? (I'm thinking about flavour combinations that would work...)
posted by finding.perdita at 11:44 PM on December 23, 2015

Response by poster: Thanks for the advice, everyone. I definitely did not reduce my pectin enough - I had to boil my extra bit for ages before it passed the rubbing alcohol test, but it did eventually. However, while adding it caused it to set a little bit more, no Christmas miracles occurred and it's still basically fluid, so into seltzer water and onto ice cream it will go.

Next time I'll know better how to judge my pectin, so that'll be good. Pinback, I'd love to know where you found the pectin... I can't find it on either supermarket's websites, either, just the Jamsetta and the Jam Sugar (caster sugar + pectin).
posted by olinerd at 6:17 PM on December 26, 2015