'Hot and Cold' Sweets

At a recent exhibition about experimental approaches to food, one company mentioned they made a line of 'hot and cold boiled sweets' - basically sweets with chemicals that dissolve both endothermically and exothermically in the mouth. COOL!! Unfortunately, they sold out before I could get my hands on them and it was too crowded to ask any questions. I've been thinking about this furiously and am embarrassed to say that despite my science background I can't really think of any candidates for exothermically dissolving compounds beyond, say, capsaicin (I mean, I'm assuming the product is a bit more sophisticated than mixing mint oil with chili oil), so I'm putting it out here! That aside, is there a strategy for simply having that endothermic/exothermic effect without the taste of something, like mint, for example?

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Chris_Young_80640

In my experience, capscaicin is usually used for the hot effect, and crystallized xylitol sugar is used for the cooling effect. Xylitol is interesting in that it take a lot of heat energy to melt the crystals, and so it strongly cools your mouth, without the minty sensation of other compounds like menthol.

kevinngsi_jie_81749

Thanks!! I didn't know about Xylitol, and from googling apparently Erythritol does a better job...that's really quite cool. Since they are so commonly available, I'd probably just grab both and experiment with them, but do you have any tips or advice on how to work with them in candies? The blogs I found suggest the traditional way or candy making by heating the sugar syrup doesn't really work because it recrystallises out. Is it possible to get a uniform candy in the home kitchen with the cooling effect of xylitol, though? I'm hoping it didn't work because they used purely sweetener..would using a blend of cane sugar/sweetener or adding isomalt/glucose help? Thanks again!

Chris_Young_80640

To get the cooling effect, you need the xylitol to be in a crystalline form. If you melt it and cast it as a sugar "glass" that doesn't recrystallize, you won't get the effect from the latent heat of fusion as the sugar alcohol goes from crystalline solid to liquid solution.

I believe that you could prepare a saturated syrup by boiling it to a high temperature, then adding some crystalline xylitol to the mixture as it cools to cause it to recrystallize as it hardens after casting.