Solved the question that troubled me for many years when I was a child - Why does popping candy "explode"?

When we were young, eating snacks was probably the favorite of most children, especially various kinds of spicy strips. What’s amazing is that those children who said they couldn’t eat spicy food are not at all hesitant when it comes to eating spicy strips. They can just crunch down a few. So spicy strips should be considered a classic snack when we were young.

However, after growing up, the snack that left the deepest impression on me was not spicy strips, but a kind of candy - popping candy.

Popping candy, as the name suggests, is candy that can jump.

Friends who have eaten popping candy will probably never forget the feeling of eating it for the first time: pour a handful of candy into your mouth, then wait for more than ten seconds, and along with the slight pain in your mouth, you suddenly hear a hissing and crackling sound in your head.

That’s right, the candies in your mouth seem to have started a party, jumping up and down in your mouth until their lives are “exhausted” and then they slowly die down.

This feeling seemed like magic at the time.

In addition to being surprised by the "stimulating" feeling, my friends and I wanted to know how popping candy is made and why it bounces in the mouth.

In fact, the principle is very simple: popping candy will "deflate". This "deflation" comes from the special processing technology of popping candy.

The ingredients used in popping candy are no different from those of ordinary candies. Various raw materials for making sugar are mixed and heated to make a rich hot syrup.

At this point, if the hot syrup is cooled and processed by a machine, it can become industrialized soulless hard candies.

But if you choose to go the popping candy route, the hot syrup will be sent to a high-pressure chamber (600psi) filled with carbon dioxide to be stirred and "inflated". The pressure inside is about 40 times that of normal atmospheric pressure.

After being stirred evenly, the hot syrup will continue to cool in the high-pressure chamber. During this period, the carbon dioxide in the syrup wants to escape and continue its free life, but the cooled syrup "seals" the carbon dioxide.

Then after returning to normal pressure, the sugar block filled with high-pressure carbon dioxide will crack into many small pieces. Due to the randomness of this fragmentation, the shape of the popping candy is not as regular as ordinary hard candy.

Although the sugar cubes cracked, there were still many small bubble structures inside these small fragments, which "sealed" the high-pressure carbon dioxide bubbles.

Image source: thenakedscientists

When we put popping candy into our mouths, the saliva secreted by the mouth begins to dissolve the syrup on the surface . Since the candy particles themselves are very small, the outer wall that "seals" the small bubbles begins to become fragile. At this time, the carbon dioxide gas in the candy runs out and starts "dance" in place with the small candy , producing crackling sounds in the mouth.

In addition, carbon dioxide can be released not only through dissolution, but if you directly crush the structure of the popping candies, you can also see them jump.

Besides popping candy, the most common food that releases gas is probably cola.

Actually, there is a little connection between them.

Because the way Coke is made is very similar to that of popping candy. One is to add carbon dioxide to a liquid (Coke), and the other is simply to fill a solid (popping candy) with carbon dioxide.

And interestingly, the chemist who first created Popping Candy, William A. Mitchell, only used Popping Candy as an ingredient. He actually wanted to dissolve the candy containing carbon dioxide in water to make instant carbonated soda (such as Coke).

But unfortunately, this "instant carbonated soda water" was not successfully developed at that time, and the popping candy recipe was forgotten for twenty years until another chemist improved the recipe and made the popping candy we see today.

After Popping Candy came out, parents were initially worried that it would harm their children due to its "lively" properties. However, after the manufacturer and the public relations work (writing about 50,000 letters to school principals across the country), parents gradually accepted this new candy.

But the good times didn't last long, and rumors spread that eating popping candy with cola would cause it to explode in the stomach, which is very dangerous...

It has to be said that due to the characteristic of Coke that it would puff up when shaken, many people believed this statement at the time.

But in fact, the carbon dioxide contained in a pack of popping candy is only about the amount of carbon dioxide in half a can of Coke. If you drink it together with Coke, no strange chemical reaction will occur. At most, it is equivalent to drinking half a bottle of Coke more. Burping is inevitable, but an explosion will not happen.