Equipment and Technology

in the Hard Candy Industry

Cooking has evolved from open-fire to today’s totally
continuous system.
Jack Collins
Collins Resources, Inc.

V Cooking in a confectionery plant has pro-

gressed over the years from open-fire cook-
ing to today’s totally continuous systems,
Figure 1 shows the various stages that
the Simplex cooker went through in order
to arrive at its final configuration. The ini-
tial designs had the problem that if the
which perform, more or less, all the basic
functions with a minimum of human inter- product had too much moisture, for
vention. David Hess gave a very good pre- instance, in taffy or caramel, the turbulence
sentation on this subject at the 1995 AACT of the reboiling carried the candy up into
Technical Seminar. It appeared in the Man- the dome and out to the sewer via the vac-
ufacturing Confectioner in October 1995. uum pump.
This made quite a mess and caused a sig-
SIMPLEX COOKER nificant mechanical problem in the vacuum
pump. The pump that was used at that time
Collins provides con- The progression was essentially from a char-
was a very tight tolerance unit and about
sulting services to con- coal-fired cooker to the various other forms
fectionery companies the only person who could rebuild them
of stove until Vacuum Racine hit upon the
after a long career in was Carl Emelius in Philadelphia. Eventu-
the industry. He joined idea of combining atmospheric cooking with
ally these pumps were replaced by the Sihi
Baker Perkins in 1951, a vacuum. This had the effect of lowering
and has worked at the boiling point of the syrup after the cook
Simplex Cookers — Three Models
Rowntree Mackintosh, and thus significantly improving the con-
Hamac Hansella and
trol of the reducing sugars. It had the addi-
Minter Candies.
tional advantage of reducing the tempera-
ture of the cooked product, and thereby
reducing the total processing time.
Eventually Racine improved the process
to make it a total cooking system which not
only vacuumed but also cooked the prod-
uct. This was the Simplex cooker, of which
Jack Collins there were many models. Figure 1 ®

68 May 2005 • The Manufacturing Confectioner