- No, I told them your candy
was absolutely indescribable. - Hey Chandler, do we know that lady? - Maybe, isn't she the
woman who lives below you and have sex really loud. - Oh, right.
I'll do it just this once, but you can't tell anybody. - Yes yes, please just give it to me. - Yeah that's her.
- Yeah that's her. (audience laughing) - Hey, what's up guys. Welcome back to Binging with Babish, with this week I forgot to record my sort of walk-on introduction things, so we're gonna recycle this
one from last week's episode, let's take a look at these oxtails. Perfect, and now we can
start making Monica's candy from friends, which I always imagined as a chewy caramel covered in chocolate. So in a medium saucepan, we are combining 60 grams of water, 155 grams of light corn syrup and 400 grams of granulated sugar, which we're gonna place
over medium high heat, stirring minimally with every intention of bringing up to 320 degrees Fahrenheit. Once 320 is reached we're to kill the heat and start to streaming in a
mixture of butter and cream, 230 grams of butter melted
into 230 grams of cream, adding a little bit at a
time whisking constantly and then once everything's added, we're gonna return the
caramel over medium high heat and cook until we get it back up to 240 to 245 degrees Fahrenheit. The softball stage, 240 if
you wanna a softer caramel, 245 if you wanna chew your caramel, then we're adding just a
little dash of vanilla extract and a whole lot of dashes of kosher salt. I mean, salted caramel,
you ever heard of it? Whisk to combine, and
then we're pouring it into a prepared baking dish of some kind, I've got a square one here that has both been liberally greased with nonstick spray and lined with parchment paper. Once poured, it must be cooled completely, I'm talking at least six hours, only then can we even consider turning out and cutting into our desired shapes, amending both sides of a
sheet of parchment paper with nonstick spray set
in the rimmed baking sheet to receive such shapes, and I had just enough
foresight to use this 10 that has a removable
bottom for easy extraction. We're going to invert
our black oak caramels onto a greasy surface, remove the plates and parchment paper, and then we can begin scoring and cutting, a supposedly precise process
that I did pretty imprecisely after greasing up my knife, I carefully measured in scored
perfectly square caramels, but once I got down to
actually cutting them, I just kind of eyeballed it. This is homemade candy after all, it should look kinda homemade, right? So once everybody has been cut into cubes, it's time to coat them in chocolate, which means we must tangle
with the archnemesis of all great British
baking show contestants, tempering the act of melting and then recrystallizing chocolate so that it holds the
shape at room temperature. We'll start by chopping up a
whole mess of dark chocolate, which we gonna place
in a large glass bowl, which we're then gonna place over a pot of not quite simmering water. The objective here is to simply melt the chocolate completely, start constantly, make sure
that your water does not boil and bring it up to a temperature of about 110 to 220 degrees Fahrenheit. Then we're gonna take it
off the heat and seed it, that is we're gonna add a lesser amount of very finely chopped unmelted chocolate. This is both gonna cool
down our melted chocolate and encourage it to recrystallize, effectively what we're doing
is melting the chocolate and then adding some unmelted chocolate to try and help it
remember where it came from and then stirring it vigorously and constantly in exhaustively, until it hits 86 degrees Fahrenheit, this might take like 45 minutes, so the way to cool off
your chocolate more quickly is to transfer it to a
stainless steel bowl. This doesn't retain as much heat as glass and it's gonna cool
things off more quickly. If even after all this,
your chocolate is still hot, you can add more seed chocolate, which is both gonna cool it further and encouraged crystallization. But if that seed chocolate doesn't melt, you might need to return things to the heat for just a few seconds. And I really mean just a few seconds, just enough to melt the seed chocolate. At this point you don't want things to go above 94 degrees Fahrenheit, otherwise you're starting from scratch. Now to show you how important temperatures are in this process, I'm going to show you
something of a demonstration, as you can see I've got my chocolate down to about 91 degrees Fahrenheit, so I'm going to perform
a temperature test, dipping a thin spatula in the chocolate and letting it set for two minutes. And as you shall see in
the impending closeup, it's pretty set but it's dull, but this whole time I've been agitating and cooling the chocolate, so when I dip the tester in once more, letting it set for another two minutes, you'll see the difference
that temperature can make. The chocolate is shiny and pretty and ready to coat our caramels, which we're going to painstakingly dip into the chocolate one at a time. The easiest option is
to use a pair of forks, because that's gonna
allow excess to drip away. Just make sure each caramel, is thoroughly coated in chocolate and place it on a prepared
parchment paper set in a rimmed baking sheet, trying to shake off as much
excess chocolate as possible, so you don't have a foot on
the bottom of your candies. Then while these guys are still wet, we've gotta finish them off
with a little bit of flaky salt. I'm pretty sure not salting your caramel is a class three
misdemeanor in most States, it was after the 20th caramel
or so that I wised up, and started to use some fondue forks, world renowned for being able to contend with molten chocolate. Now we're just gonna rinse and repeat with the remaining caramels, heating the chocolate as necessary but never bringing it over
94 degrees Fahrenheit, until we have ourselves
a completed flatter of perfect chocolate covered caramels. As you can see, the chocolate shell is
set at room temperature, it's nice and shiny, and it looks like a thing
that you might buy at a store, but how do they taste? I wouldn't say that they're indescribable but they definitely tastes
like little drops of heaven. They're soft and chewy and
stretchy and sweet and salty, and just about everything
I'd hope they'd be. I would advise against sharing these unless you want unruly neighbors. (upbeat music)
Having never seen Friends and the only other food from it I remember being the Rachel's trifle episode, I was entirely ready for Andy to make candy from the ox tails
That oxtail really had me! I was trying to figure out if he was making gelatin or something.
Props to all the chocolate tempering without once panic asking Sohla for help.
If you pay close attention you can pinpoint the exact moment many knife aficionados screamed in terror and started typing an angry Youtube comment.
My wife is allergic to corn, anyone have a good idea for a sub? I want to make these for her
Doesn’t Monica’s candies have like a white chocolate drizzle?
Did he use a human thermometer for the chocolate?
Question. Thinking about steeping lavender in the water used in this recipe for a light floral taste. Is this a good/bad idea?
My mom and I love Friends so much and we've had so many debates about Monica's candy. Suffice to say, she always said it was something chewy like caramel and this proved it.