Gallery: This Is How You Craft 16,000 Candy Canes in a Day
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Cook Sixty pounds of corn syrup, 70 pounds of sugar, and 1.5 gallons of water (above) are loaded into a vacuum cooker and simmered at 272 degrees for 20 minutes. Then cooks fold in flavors like peppermint, cranberry, or hot chocolate. They have to work fast because the mix stiffens as it cools.
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Pull The cooked batch goes into the puller, which repeatedly stretches and folds the warm candy. This aerates the mixture, transforming it from a brownish syrup into a fluffy white substance that Kencraft head cook Tyson Blanco compares to "hot marshmallow."
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Stripe An aluminum bar kneads the candy, which is formed into a dense block about 18 inches across. Cooks add color to a portion of the batch and affix thick stripes of it to the sides of the block. The flavor, colors, and texture are now recognizably candy cane, but the thing weighs 115 pounds.
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Roll & Twist A heated batch roller turns the log, reshaping it to edible dimensions, and a twist belt twirls the red stripes around the white. Left intact, the candy rope would stretch to 1,500 feet, but a cutting wheel chops it into 11-inch sticks, which are then shrink-wrapped with plastic film.
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Crook Kencraft bends all of its canes by hand. The three "crookers" load the wrapped, warm, pliable sticks into cane-shaped molds, handling each piece for only a few seconds. After they set, they're packed for shipping. It takes about an hour to turn one 115-pound batch into 1,600 canes.
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Taste Each batch is tasted to ensure that flavor, color, and texture meet Kencraft's standards. Hard-candy packing team leader Elaine Horne breaks canes to check aroma. Horne and Tyson Blanco (above) agree that cinnamon and orange cream make the factory smell best, though peppermint moves the most canes.
