Panning
Pick up a chocolate-coated licorice ball and look at it. The shell is smooth, even, glossy and, if you bite it, surprisingly thick, with no seam, no drip mark and no flat spot where it sat to dry. Nobody dipped it. Dipping produces a foot and a swirl; this was made by a process that dates to the apothecaries of the seventeenth century and is used today for everything from a Jordan almond to a coated coffee bean to the tins in our Lakrids by Bülow guide. It is called panning, it is hours of patience in a rotating drum, and once you understand it you can read any coated candy in your hand.
Where it came from
Panning began as a way to make medicine palatable. Apothecaries in early modern Europe coated bitter pills and seeds in sugar by tumbling them in a shallow pan over heat, and the technique produced the sugared almonds and aniseed comfits that were the earliest candies, the dragées of the French confectioner and the "confits" of the English. The pharmacy and the sweet shop were the same room for centuries, and panning is one of the things they shared. Mechanized drums arrived in the nineteenth century; the principle has not changed since.
The principle
A center, anything from an almond to a soft licorice ball to a malted milk crumb, is loaded into a drum tilted at an angle and set turning, so that the pieces tumble continuously over one another. A coating is added in a small quantity, as a liquid or a syrup, and the tumbling spreads it evenly over every piece in a film. Air, warm or cool depending on the coating, is blown into the drum to set that film. Then another small quantity is added, spread and set. And another. A thick shell is dozens or hundreds of thin layers, each one set before the next, and the constant rolling is what makes the coating round rather than lumpy. Time is the ingredient. A chocolate shell of the thickness on a good licorice ball takes several hours in the drum, and some fine confectioners run a batch for a full day.
Chocolate panning
For a chocolate shell, tempered or near-tempered chocolate is ladled or sprayed into the drum in thin additions while cool air is blown in, so each layer sets before the next arrives. The drum room is kept cold. Too much chocolate at once and the pieces stick together into clumps; too fast and the coating stays soft and the shell comes out dull. Because the chocolate is agitated the whole time, it crystallizes well and the finished shell has the snap of a properly tempered bar, which our piece on bean-to-bar making explains is the difference between a shell that shatters and one that bends. The last additions are often a different chocolate, white over dark for a pale shell, or a colored and flavored chocolate, and a final dusting of powder, freeze-dried fruit or cocoa is tumbled on to finish. A center that is soft, like licorice or a caramel, has to be firm enough and cool enough to survive hours of tumbling without deforming, which is one of the quiet skills of the trade.
Sugar panning: hard and soft
The other great family is sugar. Hard panning builds a thin, crisp, glassy shell of sucrose syrup, added in small doses and dried with warm air between each, and it is what makes a Jordan almond, a candy-coated chocolate lentil, a mint imperial or a gumball. It can take a day for a shell a millimeter thick, and the final layers may be colored and then polished with a little wax to shine. Soft panning uses a syrup that stays pliable and dusts each wet layer with fine sugar to build a soft, chewy coating, which is how a jelly bean gets its shell around its gummy center. Both depend on the same rule: thin layers, fully set, repeated.
Finishing
Panned candy is polished, either by tumbling with a little confectioner's glaze or wax, or, for chocolate, by tumbling in a cool drum until the friction brings up a shine. It is then inspected; doubles, where two pieces fused, and irregulars are removed. The perfectly uniform look of a tin of panned candy is the product of hours of rolling plus a person picking out the failures.
Reading a coated candy
A thick, even shell with no seam or foot: panned, over many hours. A thin, quick-cracking sugar shell that dissolves cleanly: hard-panned sucrose. A shell that is dull, soft or streaky: too few layers, or a compound coating of vegetable fat used in place of chocolate to save time and money; the label will say "confectionery coating" or list palm or coconut oil above cocoa butter. A center that is off-round or a shell that varies in thickness: a rushed drum. A cut face, as on the halved Lakrids ball in our licorice guide, that shows a shell as thick as the center is wide: a maker who ran the drum as long as it took.
Why it is worth knowing
Panning is invisible in the finished product, which is the whole point of doing it well, and it is where much of the cost of a good coated candy lives. A tin of chocolate-coated licorice is a soft center of real licorice root, a full day in a cold drum with real tempered chocolate added a ladle at a time, a finishing dust and a polish, and a person at the end pulling the doubles. The malted milk balls of childhood were made the same way, faster and with a cheaper coating. The difference is the hours. The tins are on our licorice shelf and the chocolate confections shelf at 263 Josephine Street in Cherry Creek, Denver, and ship nationwide from theambrosianpantry.com. Cut one in half before you eat it; the cross-section is the maker's whole day.
