Product Code Database
Cotton candy, also known as candy floss ( candyfloss) and fairy floss, is a spun sugar confection that resembles cotton. It is made by heating and liquefying sugar, and spinning it centrifugally through minute holes, causing it to rapidly cool and re-solidify into fine strands. It usually contains small amounts of food flavoring and it naturally bears the color of the sugar it is made of which is often altered with food coloring.
It is often sold at , , carnivals, and , served in a plastic bag, on a stick, or on a paper cone.
It is made and sold globally, as candy floss in the United Kingdom, Ireland, India, New Zealand, and South Africa, as fairy floss in Australia. Similar confections include the Korean and the Iranian .
Machine-spun cotton candy was invented in 1897 by dentist William Morrison and Confectionery John C. Wharton, and first introduced to a wide audience at the 1904 World's Fair as Fairy Floss with great success, selling 68,655 boxes at 25¢ ($ today) per box. On 6 September 1905, Albert D. Robinson of Lynn, Massachusetts submitted his patent for an electric candy-spinning machine, a combination of an electronic starter and motor-driven rotatable bowl that maintained heating efficiently. By May 1907, he transferred the rights to the General Electric Company of New York. His patent remains today as the basic cotton candy machine.
In 1915, food writer Julia Davis Chandler described "Candy Cotton" being sold at the Panama%E2%80%93Pacific International Exposition.
Joseph Lascaux, a dentist from New Orleans, Louisiana, invented a similar cotton candy machine in 1921. His patent named the sweet confection "cotton candy", eventually overtaking the name ‘fairy floss’, although it retains this name in Australia. In the 1970s, an automatic cotton candy machine was created which made the product and packaged it, making it easier to produce at carnivals, stalls and other events requiring more portable production.
Tootsie Roll Industries, the world's largest cotton candy manufacturer, produces a bagged, fruit-flavored version called Fluffy Stuff.
In the United States, National Cotton Candy Day is celebrated on 7 December.
The molten sugar solidifies in the air and is caught in a larger bowl which totally surrounds the spinning head. Left to operate for a period, the cotton-like product builds up on the inside walls of the larger bowl, at which point machine operators twirl a stick or cone around the rim of the large catching bowl, gathering the sugar strands into portions which are served on stick or cone, or in plastic bags. As the sugar reserve bowl empties, the operator recharges it with more feedstock. The product is sensitive to humidity, and in humid summer locales, the process can be messy and sticky.
Typically, once spun, cotton candy is only marketed by color. Absent a clear name other than "blue", the distinctive taste of the blue raspberry flavor mix has gone on to become a compound flavor that some other foods (gum, ice cream, rock candy, fluoride toothpaste) occasionally borrow ("cotton-candy flavored ice cream") to invoke the nostalgia of cotton candy. The sale of blue cotton candy at fairgrounds in the 1950s is one of the first documented instances of blue-raspberry flavoring in America. Pink bubble gum went through a similar transition from specific branded product to a generic flavor that transcended the original confection, and "bubble gum flavor" often shows up in the same product categories as "cotton candy flavor".
Studies have shown that the chemical can increase the risk of cancer and Europe and California have made its use as a food dye illegal.
|
|
