How toffee is made

Toffee is cooked to the hard crack stage, hot enough that a drop snaps like glass when it cools.

stations: 9
things upstream: 70
raw sources: 25
steps from the ground: 10

The short version

A typical factory toffee starts as sucrose, glucose, butter, palm oil and sweetened condensed milk dissolved in water. Cooking drives off the surplus water, and the batch is held hot until it caramelizes. From there it either cools to a plastic state, gets shaped into a rope, cut and wrapped, or goes straight into molds from a depositor.

Mix a slurry

Automatic weighing tanks combine sugars, milk and fats with water into a consistent slurry. Batches move to reservoir tanks that feed the cooker.

Goes in
Sugar Butter Palm oil Condensed milk
Cook off the water

Surplus water evaporates in the cooker. One equipment maker's version spreads the syrup as a thin film and works fast, so the milk solids spend little time near scorching heat.
Hold until it browns

The liquid stays hot long enough to caramelize, which sets the flavor and color. Traditional hard toffee reaches the hard crack stage at 149 to 154 degrees Celsius.

149 to 154 °C for hard crack
Fold in nuts

Almonds, other nuts or raisins are sometimes stirred through the hot batch. Modern lines can carry such pieces without crushing them.

Goes in
Almonds
Cool to a plastic state

On the traditional line the caramelized liquid cools until it is soft and workable.
Shape a continuous rope

The plastic mass is molded into one long shaped rope. That rope limits the shapes a factory can make, since every piece is cut from it.
Cut the pieces

A cutter chops the rope into individual toffees. Changes in room temperature can leave them with poorly squared ends.
Or deposit into molds

Newer lines pump cooked toffee straight into silicone or metal molds. Toffee tends to stretch into a tail at the nozzle, and one patent breaks it with a pulse of heated compressed air.
Wrap the pieces

Pieces go through a wrapping machine. Regular shapes from a mold handle better here than uneven cut ones.

End of the lineToffee

Worth repeating

Nobody knows where the word toffee comes from, and the earliest printed use dates to 1825.
The very buttery almond version sold in the United States as English toffee is hardly like the toffee sold in the United Kingdom, where it goes by the name butter crunch.