Who does not like soft delicious cotton candy!!! Ever imagine a country fair without it? Colourful, tasty morsels of cottony sugar that simply melts in one’s mouth and transports one to a state of bliss. No prizes for guessing that cotton candy is made of sugar, but ever wondered how granulated sugar gets metamorphosed into this even more delicious form of cotton candy. Let us explore together
Sugar is made of a compound called sucrose and has two units – glucose and fructose. These sugars are basically made up of Carbon, Hydrogen and Oxygen atoms arranged in a specific manner. How can these atoms get rearranged to form a different form of sugar as in cotton candy? To understand this let us see what happens inside a cotton candy making machine.
To put it in very simple terms, this machine ideally has a heating element that is in close contact with a bowl-like arrangement for holding the granulated sugar. The principle is to heat the granulated sugar to the extent that the bonds holding the fructose and glucose moieties are disrupted, (not completely into its basic elements of water and carbon but somewhere before that stage with a rearrangement of its constituent molecules), resulting in a process called ‘caramelisation’ of sugar – a term used to denote burnt sugar.
At this temperature, the sugar melts and when fluffed up it can be made into fibres. Modern technology had aided this process by introducing a machine which has very small holes in the bowl where the sugar is held as it melts (Trivia: This machine was invented by a dentist William Morrison and confectioner John C. Wharton in 1897).
The entire contraption is then spun at speeds which result in the liquid sugar being forced out and away of the bowl by ‘centrifugal’ force (Cotton candy is also called spun sugar because of this reason). The sugar as it leaves the inner bowl through these holes gets solidified into very thin fibres when they come in contact with the cooler air outside the central bowl. These fibres are collected as a thin mesh in the outer container. At this stage it is easy to scoop these fibres or gather them by twirling around a stick as the cotton candy man does and present it to little children like you with a flourish.
Flavours and colours are added to this sugar to make varieties, but believe me, just the plain cotton candy is as delicious as any of its other variants. Wrapped around a stick, bundled into a paper cover, topped onto a cone, whatever way these sugary strands are presented, they are no doubt a treat to the taste buds for all who feast on it.
Want to know more on fluffy cotton candy? Click on:
https://chemistry2013-14.tumblr.com/post/75624209704/can-you-think-of-a-tasty-treat-that-is-soft
https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/Sucrose
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caramelization
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_candy