Lokum (Turkish Delight, a Starch-and-Sugar Gel)

Variations

• Flavours: rose water is the original; lemon, peppermint, bergamot and mastic (damla sakızı) are all common. Mastic changes the chew as well as the smell.
• Inclusions: pistachio, walnut, hazelnut. Cevizli sucuk is walnuts threaded on a string and dipped repeatedly in this same paste — the gel used as a coating rather than as a block.
• Double-roasted pistachio lokum: set around whole pistachios and cut in thick slices, like the centre bar in the photograph.
• Coconut-coated: rolled in desiccated coconut instead of starch, which also slows it going damp.
• The name comes from Ottoman rahatü'l-hulkum, "comfort of the throat", and it is eaten across the Balkans and Greece as rahat lokum.

Tips

• It is the exact opposite of tanghulu. That drives sugar to 155C, out of which every trace of water is gone, and sets it as crystal-free glass. Lokum stops at 118C, keeps a good deal of water, and spends the whole recipe stopping crystals from growing. Same sugar, same pan, opposite aims.
• What the acid does is not sweetness. Lemon juice or cream of tartar splits some of the sucrose into glucose and fructose. A mixture of differently shaped molecules cannot pack into a lattice, so it does not go grainy. What sugar does lists four jobs for sugar and this is not among them.
• There is a moment not to stir and a moment you must. While the syrup boils, do not stir at all — a spoon drags crystals off the pan wall into the syrup, where they seed. Once the starch is in, stir for the whole hour or it catches and lumps. The rule reverses inside one recipe.
• The hour cannot be shortened. That is the time the starch takes to gelatinise fully and for its chains to break down enough that the set is chewy rather than stiff. Stopped at twenty minutes it tastes of paste and will not cut.
• The dusting must contain starch. Icing sugar alone meets the moisture at the surface, dissolves, and goes sticky. Starch does not dissolve and is what keeps the pieces apart.
• It is a fifth way of setting a starch. Dotori-muk cooks starch all the way to a sliceable block, oyster omelette stops it deliberately halfway, cheung fun sets it as a thin film, and yokan uses agar. Lokum sets it with sugar still holding on to the water, which is what makes something that cuts and yet chews.
• Never refrigerate it. Damp dissolves the coating, and the water inside starts crystals. Kept airtight at room temperature with plenty of dusting, it lasts weeks.