One Week Wonder
Would you wait a week to eat a jellybean? You don’t have a choice! It takes about a week (and sometimes longer) to make a jellybean. Candy factories make thousands of these tiny yummies, but only one flavor can be made at a time.
Why does it take so long? Unlike other candies made by shaping or molding a sugar mixture, jellybeans are made in several stages and have to age, or rest, between each stage.
It all starts with the chewy center of the jellybean. The basic recipe includes sugar, water, starch, and corn syrup mixed and cooked together to make a thick liquid. For gourmet jellybeans, a flavor is added to the mix. Traditional jellybeans have plain centers with flavor only in the outer shell.
The liquid moves to the next stage through pipes. Before it arrives, hundreds of trays are prepared with a layer of fine cornstarch. A machine, called a die, presses perfect jellybean-shaped holes into the cornstarch. Thousands of these tiny molds fill wooden or plastic trays.
The trays move along a conveyor belt as another machine quickly squirts liquid candy into each hole. Once the trays are filled, they are stacked and moved to a heated room where the jellybean centers harden overnight.
The next day, the centers come out of the molds, and the cornstarch is recycled. The centers are coated with sugar, so they will not stick together. Then they are left to rest again for another night or two.
Once the centers have aged enough, it is time to get their crunchy outer shells. The process of coating something with a sugar shell is called panning. Jordan almonds, Boston baked beans, and jaw-breakers are also coated this way. French candy makers invented the process in the 1600s. Nuts were placed in a bowl along with sugar syrup and rocked by hand until they were thickly coated.
In a modern candy kitchen, the centers are heaped into huge metal kettles that tip nearly side-ways and spin around like a clothes dryer. Flavored liquid sugar pours over the jellybeans. They get an even coating as they tumble over each other. This process repeats four times and takes about two hours.
What happens next? You guessed it! Another night (or more) of rest.
The next day, the beans go back into the spinning kettles. Now that the candy shells have had a chance to harden, the jellybeans can be polished. A few coats of special glaze are added, one at a time, to give the jellybeans their familiar smooth and shiny finish. Once more, they go into storage for the final aging or curing process. This can take up to three days or even longer, depending on the type of bean and manufacturer.
No one knows who invented the original jellybean recipe. Perhaps the first time anyone wrote about jelly-beans was in an 1861 advertisement suggesting them as treats for Civil War soldiers. Now it’s one thing to spend a week making jellybeans in the 1800s. Everything took longer then! Hasn’t anybody figured out a way to speed up the process yet? Professor Gregory Ziegler of Penn State University researched this mystery. Using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) equipment, he studied what was going on inside jellybeans during their rest between panning and polishing. He observed that some of the moisture evaporates out of the jellybeans. This hardens the shell. But some of the moisture returns to the squishy center, making it softer. No artificial drying process can speed this up. If jellybeans don’t rest long enough, they end up in a sticky glob. If they dry too quickly, the centers are hard. The real thing simply can’t be faked or hurried. “Sometimes good things just take time,” said Professor Ziegler.
So when you pop a jellybean in your mouth, take some time to savor the crunchy outer layer. Focus for a while on the chewy center. Remember for a moment how long it took to make something that’s already gone.