I was first introduced to tanghulu a few months ago, during the wee hours of the morning. While mindlessly scrolling through my social media feeds, I came across an ASMR video of a creator unwrapping and biting into skewers of glossy, candied fruits. An array of whole peeled tangerines, strawberries, hawthorn berries and green and red grapes glistened on my phone screen like jewels you only admire but can’t touch. I’ve never craved anything more than tanghulu in that glorious moment.
The traditional Chinese street snack became an internet sensation early last year, however, its origins date back to the Song Dynasty (960–1279). Legend has it that when the emperor's favorite concubine fell ill, a two-week diet of sugar-coated hawthorn berries ultimately healed her. Today, in China, tanghulu is no longer revered for its supposed medicinal benefits — it’s a festive food commonly enjoyed to usher in good luck around the new year and Lunar New Year.
A trend of eating tanghulu initially started in South Korea, with K-Pop stars Jennie and Jisoo of BLACKPINK making the snack in their 2020 Netflix documentary “Blackpink: Light Up the Sky.” Since then, tanghulu’s fame went global and many have even attempted to make it themselves, albeit hazardously. Although tanghulu calls for just a few steps, its most treacherous — and fickle — step is making the sugar syrup. Dealing with hot, boiling sugar is certainly daunting and comes with serious health consequences if proper precautions aren’t taken.
Here to help you stay safe in the kitchen is chef Trung Vu, a chef-instructor of pastry & baking arts at the Institute of Culinary Education’s (ICE) New York City campus. Chef Vu offered a few tips and tricks on how to safely handle hot sugar so you can make as much tanghulu as your heart desires from the comfort of your own home.
What you wear in the kitchen matters
Hot sugar can easily reach temperatures of up to 400 degrees, so safety is paramount, Vu stressed. He recommended wearing long sleeves or, even, a heavy jacket in the kitchen to shield your arms from splashes of bubbling sugar.
“Whenever I teach my students here at ICE and we do sugar cooking, we roll our sleeves down,” Vu said. “That way if anything does splatter, at least it will hit our chef jacket.”
He added that wearing rubber or latex gloves won’t protect you against sugar burns and may actually worsen them.
“If you get any sugar onto your glove, now, your glove is completely stuck to you. I would wash and sanitize my hands, but definitely don't put on gloves,” Vu explained.
If you should happen to burn yourself, Vu said it’s important to remain calm and not wipe the burn away, as that will only exacerbate it. Instead, make sure you have direct access to a sink and immediately run cold water over the burn area.
Ditch the saucepan and use a sauté pan
Most recipes for tanghulu call for a medium to large-sized saucepan to cook the sugar in. However, Vu said a sauté pan is actually a better option: “A sauté pan is not going to have very high walls on it, and that way you can kind of dip your tanghulu sideways. Whereas, if you have something with five or six inch walls all the way around it, it's going to be harder to dip your fruit into it.”
If you don’t have a sauté pan and insist on using a saucepan, be sure to choose an appropriately sized pan based on how much sugar and fruit you plan on using. A good rule of thumb is to have your sugar solution fill approximately three quarters to an inch of your saucepan.
Leave your sugar alone
“I would say the biggest rule to cooking sugar, especially for something like this, is to leave it alone, actually, as much as possible,” Vu said. “It's very natural when we're in the kitchen and we have food on the stove that we want to be stirring it. But the problem with stirring sugar that's cooking is that you are promoting crystallization.”
White granulated sugar is composed of microscopic, crystalline sucrose molecules. When boiled with water, sugar will revert back to its original structure — or crystalize — when it becomes supersaturated. That means there is more sugar (a solute) in the solution than is normally possible. This occurs when the temperature of the boiled solution decreases, causing excess amounts of sugar to come out of solution and crystalize.
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“At one point, when all the sugar has kind of dissolved into the water, it just looks wet,” Vu explained. “But sometimes when you are cooking sugar, if your pot isn't completely clean or if you put a spoon or a spatula inside of the sugar and start stirring, you're giving the sugar a point to start forming the first crystal. And once a crystal has formed inside of the sugar solution, it becomes a chain reaction.”
If you do notice crystallization, try painting down the sides of your pan with water. The water will help the sugar to melt and dissolve again. Vu also recommended using an invert sugar, which is a liquid mixture of the monosaccharides glucose and fructose. Common invert sugars include corn syrup or honey.
“If you add even just a small amount of invert sugar to your sugar solution while you're cooking it, it'll help it to prevent from crystallizing,” he said. Additionally, adding a small amount of acid, like cream of tartar or a few drops of lemon juice, directly into the sugar solution can help control crystallization.
When making the syrup, the general ratio to follow is two part sugar to one part water. “That just helps the sugar to heat up much more evenly, so that you don't burn one side of the sugar and the other part of it is undissolved sugar,” Vu said.
Cook your sugar until you see a bare hint of browning
The sugar syrup used for tanghulu is clear in color, not cloudy or brown. To achieve that clear stage, make sure your sugar reaches a temperature of about 300 to 310 degrees Fahrenheit. Anything above that and your syrup runs the risk of quickly turning into caramel.
“I would also go further to say that sugar does enjoy a higher heat, so I would not be cooking my sugar solution over like a very low flame or very low fire,” Vu said. “If the bubbles are bubbling vigorously, then any crystallization that may occur kind of gets knocked out by the bubbling actions, whereas, if you have it on a lower heat, usually this leads to more chances of crystallization.”
Vu added that carryover is important to be mindful of when cooking sugar. Sugar will continue to rise in temperature even when the stove is turned off due to both the pan and sugar solution retaining heat.
“If I'm aiming for 300 degrees so that my sugar has no color inside of it, I would probably remove it from the heat or turn off the heat at somewhere around 285 to 290 degrees — or at least, lower the heat at this point — and that way it doesn't just go from the perfect consistency and perfect colorless color, to all of a sudden, caramel.”
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