Kathryn T.

My 7 year old daughter was diagnosed with Fructose Malabsorption Disorder in August, after six years of terrible digestive trouble. Now she's doing very much better on a low-fructose diet, but she misses all her favorite treats. She can tolerate glucose/dextrose, aspartame (nutrasweet), saccharin, and up to a tablespoon of sucrose (cane sugar) per day max -- in practice we try to give her almost none. We've been bumping along without sweet things, but when I asked her what she wanted for Christmas, tears welled up in her eyes and she said "I want to be able to eat candy again." I'm not made of stone. My heart just broke. I want to help her out as much as I can, which means learning how to make candy with dextrose/glucose/corn syrup and as little cane sugar as possible. I have made candy occasionally in the past, and I'm a reasonably good and adventurous cook -- I make my own salami, that sort of thing -- so I feel like this is something I can tackle if I have good resources. Which resources, though? I know that dextrose/glucose, while still a natural sugar, has very different structural and chemical properties than sucrose/cane sugar, but I don't know HOW they're different. Is hard candy out of the question? What about fudge, or caramels? What are the hard and soft ball stage temperatures?? Does glucose even HAVE a soft or hard ball stage? Are there resources, either online or in print, where I can learn more about this? Would I look at regular candymaking, or some molecular gastronomy whatnot, or. . .?

Possible bacon disaster!! I had my chunk of pork belly in the cure, as instructed, for a week. Overhauled it every day. When I went to put it into my damnably small smoker, it wouldn't fit, so I sliced a small bit off the end to make it the right size. . . and while there was an obvious ring of good-looking, dark red cure, the inner part of the cut end looked disturbingly like raw pork. I am nothing if not willing to soldier ahead, so I went ahead and slapped it into the (cold, thankfully) smoker. But after about three hours, I began to fret, and I lifted the little chunk out. . . and yeah, it was really, really not cured in the middle. I sliced it up and fried it up and tasted it;the outside bits taste like bacon, and the inner bits taste like a smoked pork chop. After consulting with my father, who has never made bacon but who is an excellent cook and an organic chemist, I made a new batch of cure and threw it back into the fridge. What went wrong? The belly is skin-on, ribs-on, and about 2.5" thick; do I just need to cure it for longer? Can it even be saved? Assuming I can fix it with a longer cure, how long should I leave it in there?

Hi! This is my first post on the eGullet forums. I've made several recipes out of Charcuterie, including multiple batches of fresh sausage and one whole pork shoulder's worth of dried fermented sausage (peperone, which was fantastic, and calabrese salami, which was merely delicious). I would say that as far as sausage goes, I have just about attained the rank of "novice"; I can go off-book and make some pretty damn good sausage without a recipe. But today? Today I make bacon. I have a 6.5 pound chunk of pork belly with the skin and the ribs still attached, courtesy of our local Asian supermarket. And I have a Little Chief smoker, which objectively sucks, but I got it off of Craigslist for a song, as well as a New Braunfels offset oil-drum smoker. I'm going to do a pretty simple brown sugar cure on the pork belly, but should I cut the ribs off or leave them on? And should I try a cold-smoke in the Little Chief, or just give it up and hot-smoke in the offset smoker, affectionately referred to as Puffing Billy around here?