Turkish Delight

Making Turkish Delight is more chemistry experiment than cookery and for that reason amazingly fun to do. The difficulty is that having made it twice, once with gelatine and once using a traditional recipe, I have not yet succeeding in creating a sweet to rival the shop bought stuff. The problem is texture related. To my mind Turkish Delight should be firmly squidgy but my latest version was described as ‘horribly soft’ – although the cubes hold their shape robustly, the oral experience is a kind of jelly meets paste scenario. Strangely moreish though.

I have not given up a finding a good Turkish Delight recipe, but I thought I would document my experience up to this point nonetheless. Research indicates that what I might be missing is mastika, a resin found in trees and traditionally cultivated on the Greek island of Chios. Apparently this is what chewing gum used to be made of so it can be used to provide a chewy bite to sweets. Although you can buy it in capsule form from health food shops in the UK it seems pretty impossible to get hold of the raw resin. So I’m planning a trip up to Green Lanes in North London to see if the Greek shops there might be able to help. I’ll update as soon as I can for all those that aren’t tempted by horribly soft Turkish Delight. Here’s a traditional recipe anyway.

Necessary equipment: electric whisk, sugar thermometer

Ingredients

800g sugar
120g corn flour
1 tbsp lemon juice
1 tbsp rose water
1 tsp cream of tartar
Few drops red or pink food colouring

For dusting
150g icing sugar
30g corn flour

1) Oil an 8’x8’ (roughly) tin, line it with baking parchment and then oil the parchment too.
2) Put 375ml water, the lemon juice and the sugar in a pan and bring to the boil whilst stirring.
3) Heat to 115C stirring all the time. Turn off heat and set aside.

4) Put 500ml water, the cream of tartar and the corn flour in another pan and bring to the boil whilst whisking all the time with the electric whisk. When it has formed a thick, gluey paste, stop.
5) Bit by bit add the sugar syrup to the corn flour paste and whisk in each addition until it is incorporated. You might want to scrape down the sides a couple of times during this process.

6) Bring the mixture to a gentle boil whilst stirring and then cook it for an hour over a low heat stirring every five minutes or so to prevent it from sticking.
7) Take off the heat and stir in the rose water and colouring.
8) Pour the mixture into the tin and leave to cool and set for a few hours.

9) Once cool remove it onto a work surface dusted with icing sugar and cut into cubes.
10) Store in Tupperware filled with icing sugar and cornflour.

After a couple of days my Turkish Delight started to lose liquid and seemed to be slowly disintegrating into a weeping, sugary morass. I rolled it again in fresh icing sugar to keep the cubes separate. I don’t quite know what the answer to this problem is, or to the question of the bizarre pasty texture, but I will keep investigating and will update soon.