Using plant-based coloring for molded sugar candies

[devinf]

Hi everyone!

 

I've been making gummies, candies, lollipops and the like for a few years now and have always used your everyday food colors and some gels. Easy peasy. I've now been asked to work on creating sugar-free/no gluten/vegan/trendy supplement hard candies. Got that covered, but I have never used plant-based "natural" food colorings. My biggest concern is how do they handle the high heats? Could someone help point me in the right direction on this? Use powders? There are a lot of options these days and I'm trying to minimize how many "test batches" and unnecessary costs I have to run through in finding something that works. I'm usually making 4 or 5L of solution at a time.

 

Any help, info or places I can read up on things would be greatly appreciated. I saw a few posts about the Chef Rubber colors. They don't have info on what the ingredients actually are and that's something I need.

 

Thanks in advance!

Devin

[minas6907]

I do gummies and pulled sugar all the time, the sugar free candies, are you making those with isomalt? I've wondered many times if isomalt would work in place of sugar with a gummies, one of those things that is on the back burner. I haven't used any of the 'natural' colors, but when you mention them, is there a specific product you have in mind? I'm aware of Chef Rubber's 'natural cocoa butter' line, but haven't seen anything that could be mixed with sugar. Just an fyi, I have a love hate relationship with Chef Rubber. In the past, I've inquired multiple times about ingredients in colorants before purchase, and was told nothing, they just sort of danced around the question. I just had to order 1 of each color type to get the information I needed.

[devinf]

I do use isomalt primarily for sugar-free. There are some candies I am experimenting with using xylitol, but that is for a specific type of candy and not for the general product line. But the use of isomalt makes me worry about the higher temperatures as well. I don't want my reds to turn brown or purples into grey (both problems I have had with gel colors - ChefMaster, etc.). Right now my need to find an acceptable high-temp coloring exceeds my need for purely sugar-free.

Edit: to answer your question of gummies.... sugar type really doesn't matter IME unless you are talking pectin-based stuff. The gelatin is gonna do it's thing so trust in that. For gummies, the only thing I concern myself with is sweetness levels.

Edited July 17, 2020 by devinf (log)

[Jim D.]

Regarding the Chef Rubber "natural" colors:  There was a discussion on this forum about the new Chef Rubber Zen colorant line. Previous CR lines have listed ingredients in detail, but the Zen color list is very vague (doesn't even say whether there is titanium dioxide). In that thread you can see that one participant contacted CR and spoke to someone who was helpful about the actual ingredients. It's a bit frustrating in that I can recall ingredient lists for other food products in the past mentioning something like beets when that was what produced the red color of the product in question.  To  be clear, I have never used or even seen the "Natural" line of colors from CR, but the consensus on eG seemed to be that the colors were subdued. The Zen colors I have tried were very bright. They do, not unexpectedly, include titanium.