Sugar, Sugar, how'd you get so fly?

By going to culinary school. And working in the industry for over a decade before that. And by recognizing that I have a lot more to learn to get even flyer every day. Heh. :)

Bummed that my gig as a lab assistant at Joliet Junior College came to an end so abruptly due to indefinite school closures and with restaurants and events still on hold, I was desperate to keep doing what I love. Only problem is, well, I love a lot of different things and I only have so many tools at home!

With my sugar rig hooked up, every surface in my kitchen cleaned completely of grease so that all the sugar stays shiny, metallic, and beautiful, and all of my tools and ingredients mised, it was time to crank up the heat!

Here's some step by step sugar pulling, I am still amazed every time I do this at how metallic looking the sugar gets just by pulling it and incorporating air as it cools.

With sugar sculpting in general, there is a lot of prep and steps to create each piece. Then once all the pieces are made, the decorating and assembling come together pretty quickly (as long as nothing breaks!). In the pictures below I've got everything ready (mised, shortened past tense version of mise en place, which is a whole blog post on its own but that's for another day!), because as soon as the sugar is cooked you only have a certain amount of time before it cools too much and is no longer ideal for pouring into molds/pulling and manipulating.

Without access to all the tools that I would normally have in a commercial kitchen, I scavenged through my cabinets to find enough to make it happen. If you've got ice, some silpats, glass pitchers, spatulas, a torch, scale, distilled water, a sugar rig with an under warming plate, an airbrush gun, metallic paints and airbrush colors, detailing paint brushes, parchment paper, dome molds, circle cutters, and a big container of sugar... you can do this project at home too! ;) Or you could order a sugar showpiece from the contact tab at the top of this page. Either way, it's still pretty cool to see the process!

After making the separate pieces using these methods above, it was time to add the color and excitement to the piece. Sugar loses clarity the longer it sits around. Torching this solid sphere helped reduce bubbles and cloudiness, although it had been sitting around for a few weeks so it was a little challenging. Then the airbrushing was the fun part, especially since I haven't gotten my compressor out in quite some time!

After a massive assembly session without a sterno (I would not recommend this, using an oversized torch like I did for the smaller pieces can lead to burns... ;) ) I was able to get a pretty nice looking under the sea themed 18" tall show piece completed.

The more impressive thing, and I think my Chef mentors would say as well, is that this piece actually stood up for a few weeks, even through multiple temperature changes and being moved a couple times. I take apart and recook my completed showpieces to turn it into new pieces, but this easily could have stayed on display in my house for several months or longer.

Sugar sculpting is something that has amazed me for many years. From the start of playing around with isomalt in the microwave with molds to put on cakes back in Effingham (shout out to my first mentor Pat Wendte, I am so grateful for you!) at my first bakery job to pushing the limits and building multi-medium pieces in school and beyond (shout out to Chef Andy Chlebana, you are one hell of a chef!), I see how little I actually know about the world of sugar and how much more I have a burning passion to continue to learn. With a 20 pound box of isomalt still burning a hole in my pantry, I'm looking forward to making future posts of my sugary adventures!