The Fudge Making Process

The Fudge Making Process

Most people think fudge is just butter and sugar, but it's a bit more than that.

We weigh out condensed milk, butter, sugar, double cream and liquid glucose. The glucose is the bit most people don't expect. It's what keeps the fudge from staying too soft when the wet ingredients go in to flavour the fudge towards the end.

Everything goes into the stockpot, brought up to temperature on the hob. The exact temperature depends on what flavour we're making that day.

Once it's there, the pot goes into cold water to cool it down fast. Then the stirring starts. By hand. For quite a while.

When the fudge starts to thicken and "go off" in the pot, that's when the flavour goes in. Liquid extracts first, dry ingredients after. We keep stirring until it's all mixed through, then pour into trays. Each tray takes just under 2kg.

We can only ever do two trays per batch. With the honey-based fudges we stick to one. White sugar rises a lot more than brown. And there's no recovering a batch that's burned, or a pot that's boiled over onto you.

Decorations pressed in go on straight away. Anything sprinkled on top waits until it's cool enough to not damage, but warm enough to still hold.

Then we leave it for 24 hours to harden properly. Some batches need 48.

After that, every piece is hand cut, heat sealed, and packaged by hand. Every batch gets a production sheet with its own batch number and best before date.

Cooking takes about an hour per flavour. Packaging another hour on top. It adds up, but we wouldn't do it any other way.