Home › Christmas Dinners › Molasses Puffed Rice Bars
Molasses Puffed Rice Bars
1 cup molasses 1/2 teaspoon soda 1 teaspoon vinegar 1 tablespoon butter 1/2 to 1 cup puffed rice Cook molasses, vinegar and butter to hard ball stage. Add soda. Remove from fire and beat lightly; then pour it over layer of puffed rice in greased pan. When cool, cut in bars.
A one-pan molasses candy poured over puffed rice, close kin to popcorn balls and cracker jack. It comes together in about fifteen minutes, and the only thing that decides success or failure is the temperature of the syrup.
- Hard ball stageUse a candy thermometer and cook to 250-265F. Below that the bars stay tacky and will not cut; much above it and they turn hard and brittle rather than chewy.
- The soda is the pointAdding baking soda to hot acidic molasses foams the syrup and aerates it, giving a lighter, more crumbly bite. Beat it in only briefly -- long beating knocks out the gas you just created.
- Work fast after the sodaThe mixture stiffens quickly once off the heat. Have the puffed rice already spread in the greased pan before you start cooking so there is no pause.
- MolassesUse unsulphured baking molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter at this concentration, and not sulphured, which tastes harsh in candy.
- Puffed rice quantityThe original gives a range of half a cup to a cup, which at either reading makes a very syrup-heavy candy. Considerably more plain puffed rice -- three to four cups -- will give bars that hold together better, though this is a departure from the original proportions.
- PanAn 8-inch square pan suits this quantity. Grease it well, or line with parchment and grease that, since cooled molasses candy grips metal.
- CuttingThe recipe says to cut when cool, but in practice it is easier to cut while still warm and pliable: once fully set the bars tend to shatter rather than slice. A buttered knife or bench scraper helps.
- Yield and storageAbout sixteen small bars. Wrap individually in wax paper and keep airtight -- molasses candy draws moisture from the air and goes sticky within a day or two otherwise.
Puffed rice was a novelty of the early twentieth century, made by a steam-pressure process shown off at the 1904 St. Louis exposition and sold in boxes as a breakfast cereal. It lent itself to candy as a cheap, weightless bulk, and cereal-and-syrup bars and balls appear in printed recipe collections of the following decades. Molasses was the older sweetener in that role, carried over from the taffy and popcorn-ball tradition, and it was generally cheaper than refined sugar.