How It's Made: Candied Fruit
Vocab level: C1
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Candied fruit and fruit jellies are Middle Eastern in origin and spread to Europe around the 12th century.
This region of France has been producing them since the 15th century.
When wars blocked access to cane sugar,
fruit farmers began planting sugar beets to preserve this confectionery tradition.
This company in France has been catering to people's sweet tooth since 1880
with its gift boxes containing traditional candied fruit and fruit jellies.
To make candied fruit, a master confectioner boils fresh fruit for many hours to soften the fibers.
This process will later help sugar to penetrate the fruit.
He pokes the fruit to see if it's ready.
Boiling time varies from one hour for apricots to eight hours for chestnuts.
Citrus fruits are sliced before boiling.
After boiling, the more fragile types of fruit, such as apricots, pears, and clementines,
go into large hot-air dehydrators for up to three weeks.
Every day, the master confectioner replaces the evaporated water with sugar syrup,
which concentrates over time.
For less fragile fruits, the technique is different.
Workers heat them in vats of sugar syrup for about 10 days.
The moisture evaporates, and the syrup concentrates.
The factory sells whole candied fruits like this collection of clementines, apricots, pears, figs, and plums to gourmet food shops,
which sell them by the piece or in elegant, private-label gift boxes.
Whole candied fruit are also popular for designing edible arrangements.
Making fruit jellies is a different process.
The recipe combines fruit pulp, making up more than 50% of the mixture, with powdered sugar,
liquid glucose (a form of plant sugar),
pectin to make the mix gelatinous,
and natural fruit flavoring.
A worker boils down the mix for a half-hour to concentrate the sugar,
then adds more fruit flavoring.
As the mix continues to cook, she draws samples to measure the sugar content.
She does this until the mix hits its target concentration of 78%.
Another worker pours the batch from the pot into a large pitcher,
then into a square stainless-steel mold.
It takes the jelly a day to set.
Once set, a worker removes it from the mold (this one's a different flavor)
and coats it with crystallized sugar to preserve it.
The worker then lays the jelly square on a cutter the company calls a guitar
because its steel wires look like guitar strings.
The wires cut once in each direction to make cubes.
Then, another worker applies a second coating of sugar.
In addition to this small-batch production, the factory has one automated machine,
which makes fruit jellies in a variety of geometric or fruit shapes created by templates made of plaster.
This process is much faster than the handmade approach.
First, the machine makes a bed of starch.
Then it presses the plaster form into the bed to create mold cavities.
The next station fills the cavities with hot liquid fruit jelly.
Then, the molds are set aside for a day.
The starch absorbs the residual moisture as the jelly sets.
The next day, workers load the molds on top of the same machine,
which flips them to dump out the jellies.
The jellies tumble down a vibrating conveyor belt.
The starch shakes off with each bounce.
Then they pass under a spinning brush, which removes any remaining starch.
The conveyor moves them into a rotating drum, which showers them with sugar.
On the packaging line, a slow conveyor belt moves retail boxes in front of a row of workers.
Each worker is responsible for a single flavor.
While placing the required number of fruit jellies in the box,
she also performs a quality control check,
removing and replacing any that are misshapen.
This ensures that these traditional fruit jellies look as good as they taste.
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