I had friends over around the holidays and suggested making tanghulu, because I’d had the recipe bookmarked for a while. One of my friends had been seeing teens making it in the microwave and burning themselves recently, so that is possibly a thing, but we managed to make it with no injuries, and I quite enjoyed the result! You get a hard candy coating on the fruit(s) of your choice!

Ingredients:

• fruit – grapes worked well, berries would work well (they weren’t in season so I didn’t get any), mandarin segments worked but after a few days they leaked moisture that dissolved the coating, I think cut pineapple would taste very good, but you’d want to eat it the same day, before it could dissolve the sugar shell
• 2 cups sugar
• 1/4 cup water
• 1/4 cup corn syrup
• 2 tablespoons honey

To begin with, put the fruit on bbq skewers. We found that 3 grapes was a good amount of fruit – you weren’t wasting time with just one grape at a time, but it didn’t require the melted sugar mixture to be super deep for dipping later. Set aside the fruit and line baking sheets with parchment/silpats/wax paper.

Combine the remaining ingredients in a small saucepan over high heat, and bring to a boil.

I used a medium saucepan because I wasn’t sure if the boiling sugar mixture would boil up huge, but it really didn’t, and a smaller pan would give you a smaller area, so the mixture would start off deeper, so small pan is the way to go.

Once the sugar mixture has reached a boil, reduce the heat to medium and let it simmer until it reaches 300 degrees.

The color darkens a bit, not that you see that on the fruit.

Remove from the heat, and start quickly dipping the prepared fruit into the sugar, letting the excess drip off, and then placing on the prepared pans. If the sugar starts to thicken too much, you can return it to the heat as needed. Be very careful not to let any hot sugar drip on your hands!

One batch coated two trays of fruit.

Let the tanghulu cool for a few minutes, then enjoy! I ended up sliding the leftovers off of their skewers for easier storage, and as mentioned above, the moisture from the mandarins eventually weakened the outside of those ones (after 2-3 days) but the grapes kept very well in a tupperware in the fridge, for a few days.

Tanghulu

Slightly reordered from The Big Man’s World.

• fruit – grapes, berries, mandarins, sliced kiwi, pineapple, etc
• 2 cups sugar
• 1/4 cup water
• 1/4 cup corn syrup
• 2 tablespoons honey

To begin with, put the fruit on bbq skewers. Set aside the fruit and line baking sheets with parchment/silpats/wax paper.

Combine the remaining ingredients in a small saucepan over high heat, and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat to medium and let the mixture simmer until it reaches 300 degrees. Remove from the heat, and start quickly dipping the prepared fruit into the sugar, letting the excess drip off, and then placing on the prepared pans. If the sugar starts to thicken too much, return it to the heat as needed.

Let the tanghulu cool for a few minutes, then enjoy! Store any leftovers in an air-tight container in the fridge.