Easy Tanghulu Recipe (2024)

FAQs

What are tanghulu made of? ›

Fruit: Tanghulu traditionally has hawthorn berries but you can use any fruit of your choice. I am using grapes and strawberries. I think tanghulu is best with sour and tart fruits to balance out the sweetness of the candy coating. Sugar: Sugar creates the hard candy coating and adds sweetness to the fruits.

Start checking the mixture at around 5 minutes by dipping the chopstick in the pot, then immediately into the ice water. Bite the chopstick – it should crunch in your mouth. If it's still soft and sticks to your teeth, keep cooking! Watch the sugar mixture carefully because it's easy to burn.

Why isn't my sugar hardening on my tanghulu? If the sugar isn't setting, it means that the sugar hadn't been heated to the right temperature. Make sure you check the temperature or consistency of the sugar water mixture before dipping your fruit.

I start on my brine. So it's white vinegar, water, brown sugar, and some salt. I let that get warm, but not. I don't cook it just so the sugar dissolves, and then I take it off the heat.

hulu/) or tang hulu (simplified Chinese: 糖葫芦; traditional Chinese: 糖葫蘆; pinyin: táng húlu; lit. 'sugar calabash'), also called bingtang hulu (冰糖葫芦; 冰糖葫蘆; bīngtáng húlu; 'rock-sugar calabash'), is a traditional Chinese snack consisting of several rock sugar-coated fruits of Chinese hawthorn (Crataegus pinnatifida) on a ...

The sugar will crystallize if you stir it while you cook it. Make sure you don't stir the sugar after it comes to a simmer. If it does crystallize, add another half cup of water and start the process again. If making chocolate tanghulu, once the cocoa powder is added, it will begin to crystallize.

Satisfyingly crunchy, but not safe for braces.

Why is my tanghulu chewy? If you heat the sugar syrup at very low temperatures, you risk the sugar coating to be chewy. To prevent this from happening, always cook the syrup at medium-high heat.

Tooth decay

It's also important to remember that candy canes contain sugar. Frequent exposure to candy canes can cause the sugar to stick to your teeth, giving the damaging bacteria in your mouth something to thrive off of. Candy canes are also a little sticky, so the sugar can be difficult to completely scrub away.

For the best result, cover the pan with a lid and DO NOT STIR the sugar — stirring the sugar will make it crystallize and harden. If you sugar hardens, you can either retire that batch and start all over or add more water and remelt the hardened sugar until it reaches the right temperature to make chocolate tanghulu.

Can you use raw sugar in tanghulu? ›

Normal cane sugar works fine, but I chose to use raw sugar since it was my first attempt at making tanghulu and raw sugar is harder to burn. Combine the water and sugar into a saucepan on low heat and stir until the sugar is mostly dissolved, but you are still able to see some granules in the water.

Not to worry, you can keep tanghulu in the refrigerator and preserve its yummy candy shell. Store it in an airtight container with parchment paper lined on a single layer and not stacked since you want to avoid losing the hardened sugar coating. You can keep it in the fridge for up to three days.

You can check to see if it's ready by dipping a wooden skewer in the sugar and then immediately dipping the skewer into a bowl of ice water. If the sugar is hard and immovable, the sugar is ready. If you can squeeze or move the sugar, it's not ready.

It's best to eat tanghulu immediately for a perfectly crunchy texture. However, if you have leftovers, keep them in an airtight container for up to 3 hours in the fridge. You can store them for up to a few weeks, but the sugar syrup will start becoming sticky and lose its crunch.

“Dentists unanimously agree that consuming tanghulu is likely to cause cavities,” Kang said during a phone interview with the journalist. “I uploaded the video about tanghulu's health repercussions since it's a fairly new trend and wanted to inform people.”

Tanghulu is a sweet-and-sour treat of skewered candied fruit, traditionally hawthorn berries, encased in crystallized sugar. It's said to have originated in northern China during the Song Dynasty (960 to 1279), when the emperor's favorite concubine supposedly fell sick and a two-week diet of tanghulu healed her.

The Chinese hawthorn berry is a tiny, tart sphere that looks a bit like a crab apple. To turn the berries into the popular street snack known as tanghulu, vendors place several on a bamboo skewer and coat them in caramelized sugar. The result is a sweet, crispy coating surrounding a chewy, sour fruit.

Candied fruit is known as crystallized fruit or glacé fruit, where the whole fruit or smaller pieces of fruit/peel are placed in heated sugar syrup, which absorbs the moisture from the fruit and eventually preserves it (Kuwabara, 1988).