Shauna Sever - Marshmallow Madness!: Dozens of Puffalicious Recipes

Copyright 2012 by Shauna Sever
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Number: 2011933440
eISBN: 978-1-59474-695-6
Photography by Leigh Beisch
Prop styling by Sara Slavin
Production management by John J. McGurk

Quirk Books
215 Church Street
Philadelphia, PA 19106
quirkbooks.com

v3.1

CONTENTS

WAIT, YOU CAN MAKE MARSHMALLOWS?

Lets begin with a little story. A few years back, I was working on a television project for a show all about desserts and sweets. As a thank-you gift to the team, I made a whole mess of homemade marshmallows. The catch was that I had to fly to my destination and didnt want the marshmallows to get smooshed in my luggage, so I carried them onto the plane. As I passed through security, I was stopped and questioned about the contents of my cookie tins. When I informed the burly TSA agent they contained homemade marshmallows, I got some odd looks. A nervous flurry of questions filled my mind: Did I miss the news? Are they not allowing food through security this week? Do marshmallows count as gels? Oh, please dont make me toss my lovely sweet pillows from heaven! I was sure I was screwed.

But instead of scolding me for not knowing the rules, one of the agents said, What? Thats crazy, woman! You cant make marshmallows! Relieved, I replied, Oh, yes, sir. Oh, yes, you can! and I offered him a sample. Chewing with enthusiastic approval, he waved me through the X-ray machine and murmured to his coworkers about my culinary ingenuity. True story.

My point is this: More than one person has looked at me like I was crazy when I said I was writing a book all about homemade marshmallows. People may look at you the same way when you first tell them youre making these sweet treats from scratch. But when you put a freshly made-from-scratch marshmallow in their face, you will come away the hero. Because there is simply nothing like homemade marshmallowsfluffy, soft, whipped pillows of sugar.

If all your marshmallow experiences have been limited to the sort that come out of plastic bags, prepare to have your world turned upside-down. Youll be shocked to learn that you, in fact, have never had a real marshmallow at all. And that you can create them in no time and then give them to other people and blow their minds, too. Hooray!

Like all great candymaking projects, mallow-making is equal parts confection and science experiment, a fantastic kitchen project, indeed. And there are endless flavor possibilities and ways to incorporate them in decadent desserts and creative crafting. Welcome to the crazy-sweet world of Marshmallow Madness!

Id wager that your idea of marshmallows is a lot like mine was for most of my life: They come in little plastic bags from the grocery store. You toast them around the campfire for smores, melt them for Rice Krispie treats, and drop the mini version in your hot cocoa in wintertime. And thats pretty much the end of that story. Right? But in fact the history of the marshmallow is longer than the amount of time that bag of Jet-Puffed goodness will stay fresh in your cupboard.

Leave it to those amazing ancient Egyptians. They discovered how to extract the sticky, gelatinous sap from marshmallow root, which you can still find in health-food stores today. They combined the sap with honey to make a sticky confection, which was good for the sweet tooth as well as for medicinal purposes.

Westerners used the same basic concept to create an early version of the cough drop. Innovative nineteenth-century French candymakers further sweetened the formula and whipped air into the syrup to make a chewy confection. Extracting the sap was a laborious and expensive process, and soon the marshmallow-root part of the equation was abandoned in favor of gelatin (and sometimes an egg-white meringue as on ) to provide extra lift and stability.

American inventions like the extruderthe food-processing wonder that shapes just about every packaged food you can think ofmade it easy to mass-produce what was once strictly an artisan confection. By the late 1940s, marshmallows had become the commercially available variety that were all familiar with today.

In this book, were gonna take you back to the Marshmallow Old School. Which is to say the fluffy, delicious French part. Not the ancient Egyptian cough drop part. Because thats just weird.

For such a wow-inducing little treat, marshmallow requires just a handful of ingredients. Here are the essentials for whipping up a homemade batch of your very own.

SUGAR: A marshmallow without the sweet stuff is, well, definitely not a marshmallow. Youll need good white sugar and lots of it. I prefer working with pure cane sugar as opposed to generic beet sugar, because its generally of higher quality and produces the most consistent results. All the recipes in this book that call for granulated sugar were tested with C&H Pure Cane Sugar. Theres dozens of sugars on the market, and all are fair game for experimentation. If you want to play with natural sugars like turbinado or evaporated cane sugar (as in Mallows in ), start by swapping out just a portion of the white sugar for the unrefined types.

CORN SYRUP: This essential ingredient keeps the sugar from crystallizing as you cook the syrup and adds to a good marshmallows fluffy bounce and tender chew. Theres a lot of debate about this product, particularly high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). Many manufacturers (such as Karo) have reformulated their recipes so that their products do not include HFCS; check the label. Im in the everything in moderation camp, so I like corn syrup for its consistent results and easy accessibility in supermarkets.