How to Make The Ultimate Fudge

Welcome to today’s podcast. And today, we’re making fudge, the ultimate fudge recipe. With this, you only have four ingredients. So we have milk, condensed milk, butter, and then we’ll add sugar. That’s it. The wider the sauce pan the easier it is to cook. By that I mean is a wider surface area so you can stir the mixture a lot easier. So first of all, put your milks into the pan just like that. Then add the butter on the center and just keep the sugar in the middle of the pan so the liquid is on the outside and what we need to do is over gentle heat is dissolve the sugar. Now, if at any point the sugar gets on the outside of the pan, before it touched off to dissolve, what happens is it re-crystalizes and drops back into the mixture. That will make the fudge go grainy a lot quicker and it won’t cook correctly. So, just bring this together and gently stir that until all the mixtures are dissolved. What you must do is keep the mixture moving all the time. Remember, it’s quite an intensity that could heat the sugar underneath so just keep the whole thing moving. If you don’t, what will happen is the sugar will catch in different places and—will come through, so just keep that moving over low heat until you can’t hear that sound. Now in this stage, you can hear that the sugar’s dissolved, you can’t hear that anymore. You can use the spatula to your pan. And as you can see the mixture’s quite runny but if you’re not careful, if you don’t keep scraping all over the pan, the areas will catch slightly and that will take dark spots in the finished fudge so just keep an eye now and this is quite hot. I need to get to up to an even boil so all the pan is boiling not just the edge. Now, this has been boiling for about seven or eight minutes and you can see the texture is changing, it’s almost like a lava now rather than liquid. At this point, you can be very careful not to get on your hands or your skin because it will burn you pretty quickly but as long as you’re careful, just stir it gently, you will be absolutely fine. Now, I’d like to test if it’s ready. Get a little spoonful and just drop it into some iced water just like that. And that’ll sink and that will set. Give it a few seconds and I’ll show you that in a second. In the mean time, take it off the heat, pop it on a board and gently beat the mixture now for about eight to nine minutes so the whole thing thickens up. And there it is, look at that. Nice dough as it’s quite hot and that is what we call in cheffy terms, soft ball sugar and that means at that setting point, the fudge is perfect. If the mixture’s not at that point, slightly runny, it slips to your fingers into your eyes, put the pan back into the stove and get another three or four minutes and just keep testing it and it will end up just like that. As you can see, it’s changed completely and it’s starting to go quite dull and mat, that’s what we’re after. See that shine as it is going, you’re not far away. As you can see it’s thickened up as well. After eight to ten minutes, the whole thing came together and that’s about perfect. At this stage, add your flavorings, your stem ginger, or your nuts, or your chocolate whatever and just fold it through and that is perfect. Now, I’ll transfer it into parchment lined tin and this is the advantage of using a non-stick pan also. That’s it. It comes out very typically just quite a bit and just spread that around to a baking parchment and it will end up. And if you want, just pat it down with your fingers if you can. That’s about perfect, then leave that to set. It could take a half an hour. There it is, nice and set. And just we’ll open up the—take of the baking parchment and there it is. Look at that. The knife should go through it perfectly. Just draw a sharp knife through. I’m just going to show you this. Look at that texture and then we’ll cut a little square. It’s delicious. Bear in mind, the longer you beat it, the grainer it becomes. But that is really soft. I feel the texture there. There we are. There it is. Now over here, I’ve got exactly the same base but this one here’s got chocolate and hazelnuts chopped through it and this one here is glazed cherry and stem ginger. Something like great presence and it’s really easy to make. For more of my delicious recipes, go to www.carnation.co.uk.