Decoded

This candy is glass. You can eat it.

And every slice has the same face.

1. 1

   Sugar, syrup, water. 150°C.

   Hard candy is boiled to the “hard crack” stage, about 146–154°C. By then almost all the water is gone.

2. 2

   Crystals? No. Glass.

   Sugar wants to snap back into crystals. Corn syrup gets in the way, so it cools into an amorphous solid, the same kind of solid as window glass.

3. 3

   Pulled, over and over.

   Pulling and folding the warm candy traps tiny air bubbles. That's what turns clear candy white and satiny.

4. 4

   The picture is built huge.

   Candy makers assemble the face from coloured strips into a log as wide as your head. Every strip runs the whole length.

5. 5

   Then it's stretched pencil-thin.

   They roll and pull the log longer and thinner. The picture shrinks, but because every strip shrinks together, it never breaks.

6. 6

   Chop. Same face. Every time.

   This is Japanese Kintarō-ame, a candy tradition that goes back to the Edo period. Cut anywhere and the face is there.

Food is secretly science.