environmental effects on granulating sugar?

[canaanmaple]

I have a 20qt hobart, and sunday night I did a little over a gallon batch and it turned out perfect and got a little over 7lbs. Then last night tried to do a little over a 2 gallon batch and it started to get a little gummy in the bowl after granulating and i stopped the machine when it sounded like it was working harder. Same exact storage container of syrup also, so its not the syrup and has to be some sort of environmental factor.

Has that ever happened to you? Wondering if it was just too much volume in the bowl to cool off fast enough, or if it was a drop in barometric pressure since a rain front was coming in maybe? Or maybe let the syrup take too long to get to temp? (ie: a slower simmer than usual)



thanks!

[DrTimPerkins]

Could be a couple of things, but I'd suspect either:

1. You tried to do too much and bogged the machine down,
2. Boiling point temperature changed (barometric pressure), or
3. Humidity was very different.

[canaanmaple]

Could be a couple of things, but I'd suspect either:

1. You tried to do too much and bogged the machine down,
2. Boiling point temperature changed (barometric pressure), or
3. Humidity was very different.

Probably all three! :) Luckily it still came out good in the end with a little bit of extra work breaking up clumps before it cooled completely. (was kind of like a brown sugar consistency at first) Ill start keeping better records of hummidity and pressure. My water boils at 207 so I always just take it to 255 and have never had that happen until last night

[DrTimPerkins]

Best thing is you can always just add water back to it and try again or use the syrup.

[canaanmaple]

so very confident it was hummidity that caused that batch to kind of clump up. I didnt think to check the hummidity since it was cold out, but there was a rain system about to come in that same night. So read something about 35% hummidity or lower being when you wanna make confections, so finally got down to 37% and made the same size batch again and came out perfect. Supposed to be even lower all day today, so I plan to crank out a number of batches.

as to that thicker batch, it actually turned out great in the end. Just more work and ran it through a food mill to get even consistency and had zero waste.

here is a little article on the effects of hummidity in making candy.

https://www.warrellcorp.com/blog/weather-humidity-affects-candy-making/

[Sugarmaker]

Sounds like you have a handle on it!
Good luck with your sugar. You probably wouldn't hurt anything to go a few degrees higher when boiling it.
Regards,
Chris

[canaanmaple]

Sounds like you have a handle on it!
Good luck with your sugar. You probably wouldn't hurt anything to go a few degrees higher when boiling it.
Regards,
Chris

not sure about having a handle on it, but trying to get perfect consitent batches requires trial and error I guess :) So, since we had super low hummidity yesterday, I did a 3 gallon batch, which the machine can definitely handle, but I think since its a 20qt bowl, its too much volume to cool fast enough maybe so when it was looking like the consistency of brown sugar, I dumped onto the cooling pans. the granules were a little finer than what I like to make, but ended up with 20lbs.

Now today I did a 1.5 gallon batch and messed with using some "seed crystals" and it indeed started to turn and let out the steam way faster than expected! and ended up with great sugar. Now I need to figure out why that happens, but seems productive :)