Panned Candies

These are the modern version of the medieval dragées: flavorful nuts or spices coated in sugar. There are two basic ways to coat candies in a pan. In hard panning, the nut or spice or other center is rolled around a hot pan and periodically sprayed with a concentrated sucrose syrup, whose moisture evaporates and leaves behind tightly interlocked, hard layers of crystals, just 0.01–0.02 mm thick. In soft panning, most often applied to jellybeans, the jelly candy is rolled around in a cool pan with a glucose syrup and powdered sugar. Instead of crystallizing, the syrup is absorbed by the powder, and excess moisture is dried off. Soft-panned layers are thicker and less crystalline.