Melcocha Yucateca de Piloncillo

Ingredients

Equipment Needed

• •Heavy 3-quart saucepan with a thick bottom
• •Candy thermometer rated to at least 350°F
• •Marble slab or large stainless sheet pan for cooling
• •Metal candy hook or heavy wooden spoon clamped to counter
• •Oiled metal bench scraper
• •Kitchen shears for cutting the rope

Instructions

1. 1

   Prepare your station first

   This is candy work. You do not start the syrup until everything else is ready. Grease a marble slab or a large sheet pan generously with neutral oil or manteca. Set a metal hook on the wall, or a heavy wooden spoon clamped to the counter edge if you do not have one. Have a bowl of ice water nearby. Fill a small bowl with oil to keep your hands slick. Cut your banana leaves into 4-inch squares and pass them quickly over an open flame to soften. Melcocha waits for nobody. Once the syrup is at temperature, you have minutes, not hours.

2. 2

   Dissolve the piloncillo

   Place the chopped piloncillo, water, lime juice, canela stick, and salt in a heavy 3-quart saucepan. The lime is not optional and it is not for flavor. The acid keeps the sugar from crystallizing as it cooks. Without it, your melcocha turns to sand in your hands. Set the pot over medium-low heat and stir gently with a wooden spoon until every chunk of piloncillo has dissolved completely. Do not raise the heat to rush this. Undissolved sugar later means grainy melcocha later.

3. 3

   Cook to hard-ball stage

   Once dissolved, stop stirring. Raise the heat to medium and clip a candy thermometer to the side of the pot. The syrup will foam up dark and aromatic, smelling of molasses and the cane fields outside Valladolid. Cook without stirring until the thermometer reads 255 to 260 degrees Fahrenheit, hard-ball stage. This takes about 25 to 30 minutes. If you do not have a thermometer, drop a small spoonful into the ice water. It should form a firm but pliable ball you can roll between your fingers. Soft and it will not pull. Hard and it shatters. The window matters.

   Brush down any sugar crystals from the sides of the pot with a pastry brush dipped in water during cooking. One crystal seeds the rest and the whole batch turns grainy. No me vengas con atajos en este paso.
4. 4

   Pour and rest

   Remove the canela stick. If you are using miel melipona, stir it in now, off the heat, just until incorporated. If you are using cacao, sift it over the surface and fold once. Pour the molten syrup onto the oiled slab in a slow, single pour. Let it rest for 4 to 6 minutes. The edges will cool first. Using an oiled metal spatula or bench scraper, fold the cooler edges into the warmer center, again and again, until the mass is uniformly warm to the touch but no longer dangerous. You should be able to handle it with greased hands. Not before.

5. 5

   Pull the melcocha

   Grease your hands generously. Lift the warm mass off the slab. It will be dark brown, the color of wet earth. Loop it over your hook, or hold one end and stretch the other out two feet, fold it back on itself, and stretch again. Pull, fold, pull, fold. This is the work. As you pull, air enters the sugar and the color lightens from the deep brown of piloncillo to a pale honey-gold, almost the color of miel melipona itself. This takes 8 to 12 minutes of steady pulling. The dulceras of the Lucas de Gálvez market do this with their forearms and their shoulders. So will you. La cocina no es decoración, es trabajo.

6. 6

   Cut and wrap

   When the melcocha is honey-gold and starts to resist the pull, working it feels like working a stiff dough, stretch it into a long rope about 3/4-inch thick on the oiled surface. Cut into 2-inch pieces with oiled kitchen shears. Wrap each piece in a square of softened banana leaf, twisting the ends like a candy wrapper, or in parchment if you cannot get banana leaf. The melcocha sets fully as it cools and the leaf keeps it from sticking. Store in a tin in a dry place. Humidity is the enemy. In Mérida, the dulceras keep them in glass jars with a few grains of rice to absorb moisture. Así se hace y punto.

Chef Tips

• •Buy real piloncillo, the dark cones sold in Mexican markets, not brown sugar. Piloncillo is unrefined whole cane sugar with the molasses still in it, and that molasses is the flavor of melcocha. Brown sugar is refined white sugar with molasses added back. It is not the same and the candy will not taste right. Look for cones from Veracruz or Michoacán if you can get them.
• •Miel melipona is hard to find outside of Yucatán and Quintana Roo, and it is expensive when you do find it. If you cannot source it, leave the honey out entirely. Substituting regular honey is a compromise that does not honor the dish. Better to make a clean piloncillo melcocha than a fake melipona one.
• •A candy thermometer is not negotiable for this recipe. The window between hard-ball and hard-crack is narrow and your eyes alone cannot judge it. Buy a thermometer for ten dollars and stop guessing.
• •Humidity will ruin melcocha faster than anything. Do not attempt this on a rainy day or in a humid kitchen. The sugar will pull moisture from the air and stay sticky no matter how long you work it. The dulceras of Mérida know which days are melcocha days and which days are not.

Advance Preparation

• •Melcocha keeps for up to three weeks in an airtight tin stored in a dry place. Wrap each piece in banana leaf or parchment first so they do not fuse together.
• •The piloncillo and canela can be measured and chopped a day ahead and held covered at room temperature.
• •Do not attempt to make melcocha on a humid day and store ahead. The pulled candy will absorb moisture and turn sticky no matter how well wrapped.

Frequently Asked Questions

Nutrition Information

1 serving (about 19g)