Scottish Toffee Recipe on Food52 (2024)

FAQs

What's the difference between toffee and butter toffee? ›

The English toffee eaten with regularity in America is also called buttercrunch. What's the difference? Primarily, the difference rests in the ingredients. Toffee in Britain is made with brown sugar, whereas buttercrunch is made with white granulated sugar.

You might wonder why the toffee recipe includes baking soda. It is added at the end of the boiling stage and creates lots and lots of bubbles. These bubbles help to lighten the texture of the finished toffee, resulting in an easier-to-bite candy.

Low and slow. Simmering the syrup for English toffee to the requisite 300°F temperature can (and should) be a slow process — up to 20 minutes or so. Don't hurry this gradual transformation; syrup that doesn't reach 300°F, or close to it, will make candy with timid flavor and chewy (not crunchy) texture.

It's important while the toffee cooks to only stir it occasionally. Constant stirring can cause the toffee to crystallize and separate. For those of you that need to know exactly how often you should stir, I would suggest erring on the side of not stirring more than stirring.

Toffee vs Butterscotch

While butterscotch is cooked to a soft-crack stage, toffee is produced by allowing that same butter and brown sugar mixture to reach the hard-crack stage. Butterscotch tends to be chewy and pliable; toffee is brittle and more breakable.

Toffee is virtually the same thing as butterscotch, but with one major difference. It's cooked a lot longer. Toffee is purposely overcooked until reaches the hard-cracked stage. At this stage there is almost no water left in the original syrup.

Taste is obvious: sweets made with dark brown sugar will have a slightly deeper flavor with those notes of caramel and toffee I mentioned.

Made with just sugar and a little water, toffee is easy to make and is an easy introduction to the world of confectionary. This recipe includes a dash of vinegar which will help keep the colour of the toffee clear and bright and banish any cloudiness.

Adding cream of tartar when you're making candy helps prevent the creation of sugar crystals. That's why lots of icing, syrup or candy recipes call for it: it makes it so the end product doesn't have large crunchy sugar capsules.

What kind of pan is best for making toffee? ›

You need a very sturdy pan which is KEY to even heat distribution. Thinner, cheaper pans can scorch the cooking candy and/or cook it unevenly. Here are some great choices: Anolon Nouvelle Copper and Cooks Standard. I own a couple pricier copper pots because of the amount of candy I make.

Here's how you know when the toffee is ready. Keep one of the almonds near the pan. It's your color cue. When the toffee is the color of the almond skin, it's done!

If the butterfat separates out then usually this is due to the mixture being either heated or cooled too quickly, which "shocks" the mixture and causes the fat to separate out. It can also be caused by the mixture being heated unevenly (if the pan has a thin base and has hot spots).

Your toffee is better off overcooked than undercooked! Undercooked toffee won't be anything more than a caramel sauce. But overcooked toffee will be just slightly crunchier (almost unrecognizably). So, always err on the side of over-cooking!

Adding water to sugar before caramelizing it helps it melt at a more even rate, and helps reduce the risk of crystalization. You only need to add enough water to turn the sugar into a slurry, and it all boils off as you heat the syrup.

The ingredients that make up butter toffee include unsalted butter, granulated sugar, light corn syrup, water, vanilla, almonds, and dark chocolate. You can choose a different type of chocolate, but when I was working on this recipe, I found semi-sweet chocolate too sweet.

a brittle or chewy brown candy made of sugar or molasses boiled down with butter, often mixed with nuts. British. taffy.

The difference between caramel and toffee is greater, as caramel has a more liquid consistency and is usually pure sugar (it doesn't contain butter or flour). Still, the taste of caramel, fudge, and toffee is relatively similar, as they are all made from mostly sugar (as well as butter in the case of fudge and toffee).

If the heat is too high, but butter might melt too quickly and can separate from the sugar. Toffee and caramel can also separate if the recipe calls for constant stirring and the candy isn't stirred often enough.