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 Rock
Making
The
Process
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The
process has not changed over the last century.
There
have been improvements, obviously, in the equipment used and some
machinery introduced where before the job would have been done manually,
but their is still no machine that can put the letters in, that is done
entirely by hand
This
is a product over a hundred years old still made by hand.
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Ingredients
What
goes into rock?
I t
is mainly Sugar! Sucrose
(sugar) is a natural substance obtained from two sources - sugar cane
& sugar beet. the methods of extracting it may vary but the finished
products are identical.
Then we
have glucose. It comes from starch, obtained mostly from corn (maize),
though some comes from potatoes.
This is a very important ingredient in rock making because it helps to
prevent the sugar from crystallizing.
The
third ingredient is water, however , this is only to dissolve the sugar
in and most of it boils away during the first stage of the process
anyway.
Flavourings
and colourings do not go into the initial mixture as they would
evaporate during the boiling process.
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Flavours
Mint
rock, the most popular, oil of peppermint is used to flavour this.
large quantities of aniseed are made each year - also humbug, the black
& white stripped bar, again flavoured with oil of peppermint.
spearmint & peardrop are often used to flavour multi-coloured
sticks, and then there are the fruit flavours- strawberry, lemon,
pineapple, orange & lime, either used in lettered rock, or often in
rock with the design of fruit through-the most familiar being
strawberry, with the very attractive yellow and fruit design through the
middle, red casing and yellow centre.
banana
flavour is used in the yellow and brown banana-shaped rock - as you
would expect it to be. other less popular flavours, attractive for their
novelty, whisky, rum, cinnamon or cola.
the flavour of 'black jack' is a mixture of liquorice & mint, has a
very distinctive flavour which some people become very fond of, some
customers buy dozens of sticks at a time to see them through the winter
months
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Colours
Colouring
is important because it must be attractive to the eye, the intensity of
a colour must be just right, too insipid a colour is not appealing,
neither is too strong a colour.
Pink
is the most used colour for Blackpool rock, orange, yellow, black (the
stripes in humbug rock), brown (aniseed), multi-coloured - stripes of
green, pink & yellow, or blue, red, yellow, green & purple are
all colours of lettered rock made by the ton.
below
are some examples of colours & their names & equivalent 'E'
numbers,
in case you are allergic to one.
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| COLOUR |
NAME |
'E' NUMBER |
| Red |
Amaranth |
E 127 |
| Yellow |
Tartrazine |
E 102 |
| Blue |
Indigo Carmine |
E 132 |
| Orange |
Orange |
E 110 |
| Black |
Amaranth, |
E 123 |
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Tartrazine & |
E 102 |
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Copper Chlorophyll |
E 142 |
| Brown |
Carmoisinge & |
E 122 |
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Copper Chlorophyll |
E 142 |
| Pink |
Erythrosine |
E 127 |
Top of page
Sugar
boiling is a very skilful job, it takes about three years to barely learn
the job, five to be completely competent but many more to be really skilful at
it.
Stage
One.
One boiling or batch of rock is mixed in a 60/40 ratio- 60% sugar-40%
glucose, a usual 140lb batch would be 84lbs of sugar & 56lbs of
glucose boiled in a copper pan to a very high temperature (280deg F)
minimum, known as the 'crack' temperature. |
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Stage
Two.
At 'crack' temp. two men tip the contents out of the copper pan and pour
it onto two steel tables that have been greased with vegetable fat to
prevent sticking. |
| At this stage
the batch is clear liquid which very quickly cools to be handled. The
sugar boiler lifts the edge up and folds it over several times to get it
into a manageable mass for the next stage. |
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| About
15lbs of the mass is coloured pink for the casing and another 15lbs
coloured red for the letters, the coloured sections are cut away from the
mass with a large pair of scissors and kept separately. |
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Stage
Three. |
The
uncoloured part of the batch is transferred to a pulling machine. This has
three metal arms that rotate round each other
keeping the batch in the air with an action that aerates it, the clear
mass becomes opaque with the air mixing in and the texture changes too, it
becomes softer. |
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| The
flavouring is poured on to the batch during this process |
| Stage
Four & Five. |
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Lettering is
formed by taking the long flat strips of the red toffee that has been cut
away and packing the spaces with white toffee from the mass that has been
aerated. |
Getting
all the letters in order.
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Putting letters around
centre roll some above, some below.
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when the word has been set
up it is surrounded by the aerated
mass and then the outer pink casing is put on the outside of that. |
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| Stage
Six. (Rolling the Lump) |
| Two men
lift the lump and transfer it to the batch roller - it weighs well over
a hundredweight and needs two men to support it's weight to keep it in
shape - the sugar boiler stands at the end of the roller and at the end
of a 30ft long table and pushes and pulls at the slimmer end of the huge
lump of rock which is revolving inside the machine until it can actually
be pulled out along the length of the table. The table ends up full of
thirty-foot strings of rock all rolling back and forth in unison along
the table. One batch usually produces 25 to 30 strings, which are cut up
into approx. 1000 fifty-gram bars. Each stick of rock is then wrapped
individually in cellophane. |
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