Enjoy a traditional taffy pull using this wonderful vintage recipe. When I was nine years old, I used to make this!
| Prep Time: | 20 mins |
| Cook Time: | 10 mins |
| Additional Time: | 10 mins |
| Total Time: | 40 mins |
| Servings: | 30 |
| Yield: | 30 pieces |
Ingredients
- 2 cups sugar
- 1 cup molasses
- ¼ cup water
- 2 teaspoons white vinegar
- 2 tablespoons butter
- ½ teaspoon baking soda
Instructions
- Lightly grease a baking sheet. Bring the sugar, molasses, water, and vinegar to a boil in a saucepan over medium heat. Cook and stir until the sugar has reached the hard ball stage, 250 to 265 degrees F (121 to 129 degrees C), or until a small amount of syrup dropped into cold water forms a rigid ball.
- Remove from the heat, and stir in the butter and baking soda. Pour the mixture onto the prepared baking sheet, and allow to cool until cool enough to handle, 10 to 15 minutes.
- Once cool enough to handle, fold the taffy in half, then pull to double its original length. Continue folding and pulling until the taffy has turned golden brown, and is too stiff to pull anymore. Cut the taffy into bite sized pieces, and wrap in waxed paper. Store in an airtight container.
Reviews
Made it with my grandchildren. We loved it. Just like Grandma used to make.
really easy recipe
I went on a mission to try to make saltwater taffy. This recipe has been the most consistent, tasty and forgiving of all the recipes I have tried! For some reason, my saltwater taffy sometimes comes out perfect, other times is a goopy mess and other times jaw breakingly hard. I have experimented with temperatures between 250-270 and results have been inconsistent. This recipe comes out perfect anywhere between 255-270. The color is absolutely gorgeous as you are stretching it – an amazing beautiful coffee to bronze color – and the flavor is delicious. The texture is sublime – pillowy and chewy. I have given up on other flavors of taffy and sticking with molasses taffy! Thank you for this recipe! P.S. make sure to store it airtight. I put my wrapped pieces in a screw top jar and after 3 days it got a sugary crust and after 4-5 days, the whole thing turned to the sugary crust texture!
I liked it. It was a little too sweet for my taste.
This was super easy! My family loves it!
I use to make molasses taffy with my grandmother. This had the same flavor but was never taffy consistancy. It was just a gooey mess. I buttered my hands over and over. I even got a pastry scraper to try to fold it onto itself in the pan, hoping it would become a more manageable consistancy. But it never did. There was no way to pull it, it just stuck to my hands and ran through my fingers.
Lovely strong flavor! Don’t forget to butter your hands before pulling, and the scissors, and the pans… This stuff is deliciously sticky! We cut it small because it is so richly flavored, and scatter the pieces on layers of plastic wrap in a cookie tin instead of wrapping each piece individually. Its also a good idea to test your thermometer before starting: it should read 212 when placed in boiling water (at least at my altitude)
Very tasty. First time making taffy, went pretty well. I halved the recipe to try it. After cooking, I poured it into two pans. One pan worked fine and pulled into beautiful candy. The other pan became a crumbly mess. Not sure what happened but I will definitely make again! Practice should solve my problem, I believe! 🙂
Three of us pulled this taffy. I had problems with it sticking to my hands while the others did not. I ran my hands under cold water dried and reapplied butter. The taffy pulled without a problem. It was a fun project for my teenage grandchildren and a tasty treat.
Actually you dont have to pull it if you dont want Taffy. My grandmother made this for us when we were little about 45 or more years ago. We called it Molassas Candy. Cook to hard ball, pour in buttered pan, put in fridge until hard, break into pieces with hammer and it rocks!
This was the best…And only taffy we have made. It has a great flavore and we had a fun time pulling it. Although it did start to melt a little after we pulled it for a while.
This taffy has great flavour and was easy to make! I ended up with 50 pieces that I shared with friends and family; they all thought it was delicious! Definately a recipe I will make again and again, thanks! 🙂
I will need to try this again! the flavor was great but I didn’t have the pulling down and there for made a mess!
This was fun to make and has an excellent flavor. It’s now our favorite taffy.
I was very successful with this recipe. It had the texture and colour that it should and handled very well with butter on my hands like any taffy. I gave it a four because as great as it looked it didn’t quite have the great flavour that I was looking for although my kids loved it. I may come back to this but I think I’ll try others first.
I tried to make this recipe 3 times. I followed all the directions to a tee. I found that when it gets time to pull the taffy that it’s really sticky and sticks to your fingers and hands, this recipe is more like a caramel than a taffy. I don’t think I will be trying this again. I even tried cooking it a little warmer than it calls for, it still does the same thing.
**To Erin*** You pull taffy a little bit at a time, it’s a family type thing. You can’t pull it all at once because it’s too much to work with. Get the kids to help and start with a baseball to softball size piece and pull till golden. It’s a lot of fun on a family night although it tends to get eaten up during the pulling time. You had problems with it because you have to butter your hands and pull it until you work enough air through it to make it set up. All Taffy is like this, it has to be pulled for 15-20 minutes until it turns from dark brown to light golden and then it is cut into chunks and wrapped in wax paper. Also, you should calibrate your candy thermometer BEFORE you start–boil some water and stick it in the water. If it doesn’t read 212F at sea level then you need to add or subtract to get there and add/subtract the same amount of degrees for the taffy. I’ve never made it at elevations over about 90 feet, so I don’t know how it works in Denver. Candy-making is extremely precise and not very forgiving. Cooking you can improvise with good results . Baking is far more precise than cooking and candy-making requires extreme precision and is unforgiving to errors which is why so few bother, but you can’t buy molasses taffy in a store and it’s so so so good! Use the strong blackstrap molasses for a rich depth of flavor, mild molasses isn’t as tasty!