Candy Magic

Like a magician who can change a dollar bill into a dove or a glass blower who turns a ball of molten glass into a rainbow-colored figurine, a sugar worker is astonishing to watch. The craft--a form of elaborate candy-making using hot syrup so dense it’s almost solid--requires nimble fingers and steady hands, a vivid imagination and hours of practice.

But the men and women who shape three-dimensional unicorns, dragons, roses and ribbons from sugar do not simply practice sleight of hand, and their work is more than a show. In the end, those delicate sugar syrup creations can make terrific desserts.

Few culinary professionals, however, practice sugar work today. It is a time-consuming and labor-intensive process that takes pastry chefs away from the preparation of tarts, sorbets and tiramisu, the desserts that are a restaurant’s best sellers.

“Sugar is tricky,” says Ewald Notter, a sugar-work craftsman who founded the International School of Confectionery Arts in Gaithersburg, Md. “It’s some of the most difficult material to work with.” Consider, he says, the intense temperature to which sugar syrup must be boiled before being stretched and pulled by hand. And then there’s pressure to work quickly before the sugar cools and hardens.

“It’s an art,” says Donald Wressell, 38, the pastry chef at the Four Seasons Hotel at Beverly Hills. He has done sugar work 12 years now, and yet, he says, “It always amazes me how this stuff looks, even after all this time. It’s like nothing else.”

One of the earliest recorded uses of sugar work can be traced to the Middle Ages, when what were called soteltes (subtleties) decorated the tables of the wealthy. These were sweets, jellies or pastries molded into elaborate representations of lions, eagles and coats of arms. During the 17th century, when sugar was still an expensive rarity, the most drop-dead impressive banquet gimmick was to serve dishes made entirely of sugar, on dishware made entirely of sugar: in short, a meal for which everything on the table was edible, assuming a boundless capacity for sugar.

In the early 19th century, the celebrated French chef Antonin Careme made sugar work part of haute cuisine. His pieces montees (ostensibly edible centerpieces) were essentially architectural feats in confectionery, incorporating fruits, pastries and candies, that towered above the table in the form of Roman pavilions and Turkish mosques. Spectacular projects like these impressed Careme’s employers, who included Napoleon, the diplomat Talleyrand, the future George IV of England, Czar Alexander I of Russia and the Baron de Rothschild in Paris.

In Japan, sugar work is called amezaiku, or sweet candy craft, and it is said to have originated as a street corner show 1,000 years ago. Candy sculptors would carry their materials in boxes on their backs or attached to long poles and entertain passersby with dances, songs and puppet shows. When a crowd gathered, they would fashion hot candy into the shapes of animals and flowers and sell them.

Shan Ichiyanagi is one of the few practitioners of this ancient Japanese folk art in the United States. Beloved by children, who often call him “Shan the Candy Man,” Ichiyanagi, 46, creates his hummingbirds, giraffes, sea horses, eagles and swans for corporate and private parties in both L.A. and New York. He’s also performed in Little Tokyo during Nissei Week, at Echo Park’s Lotus Festival, at Disneyland and at celebrity bashes for Zsa Zsa Gabor, Jane Fonda, George Burns, Michael Douglas, Richard Dreyfuss and other entertainers.

He starts with a handful of molten corn syrup that he stores in a custom-made black metal box. Heat lamps keep the syrup warm, between 180 and 200 degrees. The syrup is dyed with food colorings and, as Ichiyanagi scoops it into his hands (covered with flour to prevent sticking), he shifts it quickly from hand to hand to speed the cooling process. Placing it on the tip of a chopstick, he then sculpts the candy glob using old-fashioned Japanese scissors. As he holds his chopstick high, Ichiyanagi’s arms and shoulders move in a gentle, graceful rhythm. He pinches and pulls the candy with swift, light snips of his scissors.

In about four to five minutes, a beautiful sculpture emerges, resembling blown glass in color and transparency. The difference is that there is texture in Ichiyanagi’s work: You can actually see and feel the miniature elephant’s wrinkles or dragon’s scales.

A Japanese fan cools the finished pieces so they solidify and, with a fine-tipped paintbrush, Ichiyanagi adds eyes, stripes and other details. Watching the process is like watching a ballet. It looks so easy, and yet it has taken years of practice to make this magic happen. “Like a wine taster,” Ichiyanagi says, “you have to sort of taste the candy to understand it from inside to outside and outside to inside.”

His inspiration has come mostly from visiting European museums and studying the work of Picasso, da Vinci, Dali and Michelangelo. And as a boy, he watched Japanese street artists create amezaiku. Nature has been a teacher too. Ichiyanagi looks around himself--at a blooming rose, at a tree--and realizes how to reproduce the living world in candy. For all his skill, though, Ichiyanagi does not consider sugar work his profession; he’s a jeweler.

Because humidity is sugar’s worst enemy (causing it to melt and disintegrate), Ichiyanagi’s clients often have their sugar work lacquered. In the hands of children, however, his art can disappear as fast as lollipops.

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At the Four Seasons Hotel at Beverly Hills, pastry chef Wressell has long been familiar with the humidity problem. He calls heat and humidity sugar’s “killers,” and the two in combination especially worry him during the summer months. Unfortunately, the summer season is when demand at the hotel is highest for his sugar work--to adorn wedding cakes.

His specialties are hand-pulled sugar ribbons and roses. These are beautiful, delicate examples of seemingly super-human patience and skill, and Wressell’s talent has been widely recognized. In 1995, he represented the United States in the World Cup of Pastry and helped win a third place award for the team. This year, he was named one of the top 10 pastry chefs in America by the editors of Pastry Art and Design and Chocolatier magazines.

To make the syrup for his pulled sugar, Wressell combines sugar, water and cream of tartar in a copper or stainless steel pot. The cream of tartar, which is acidic, prevents crystallization and softens the sugar to make it more pliable. If the weather’s not too humid, Wressell also will add glucose, which attracts moisture and promotes elasticity.

He cooks this mixture until it reaches 330 degrees, which takes about half an hour. While the sugar cooks, Wressell’s pastry kitchen begins to smell like cotton candy. And you can see that sugar’s true color is off-white, with a faint yellow tinge, though it appears white in the bag.

Traditionally, candy makers pour the hot sugar syrup onto a marble board to cool before working it. Wressell, however, has developed another method. He pours a thin layer of sugar syrup in several disposable aluminum two-pound loaf pans, sets them aside 15 minutes while the sugar temperature drops to about 120 degrees and then gently taps the solidified sugar out of the pans onto his work surface. (The sugar also can be stored in the pans in an airtight container for weeks at a time, but working with fresh sugar syrup is always best.)

Wressell prefers working on a a nonstick silicone mesh mat. Nearby is a 250-watt infrared light bulb, which helps reheat the solidified sugar quickly to about 130 degrees, turning it into what looks like gobs of melted plastic. Wressell works the gobs in his hands like pieces of dough, wearing latex gloves (another precaution against humidity; they act as a buffer between his perspiring fingers and the sugar). He snips off pieces of sugar with large, heavy tailor’s scissors, rolls them out with his hands like long bread sticks and begins pulling and twisting.

The more he pulls the sugar, doubling it over and over itself, the more air he introduces into it. The pulling becomes harder as the sugar cools, but more light begins to refract off the long strands. Within minutes, the sugar develops a beautiful satiny sheen, like a highly polished piece of metal.

It takes Wressell about 2 1/2 hours to assemble enough sugar ribbons, flowers and bows to decorate a three-tiered wedding cake. Some are so clear and shiny they look like cellophane. His sugar roses, each with 11 petals, several leaves and a long green stem (attached with the aid of a small blowtorch), could be mistaken for the real thing. Within half an hour, these thin pieces of sugar work will cool as hard as glass.

“It’s a contact sport,” Wressell says with a laugh, surveying his work. Not only does he have to work with a very hot substance, he explains, but pulling it is hard on the wrists. Still, he likes to think how people will be “just dazzled” by his sugar feats, and he is still amazed by the designs that emerge as he works.

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In another artistic effort that is impressing hotel guests, 36-year-old pastry chef Jean-Marc Viallet works with poured sugar at the Huntington Ritz-Carlton in Pasadena. His specialties are banquet centerpieces and dessert “trays” on which he arranges petits fours, chocolates and other sugar-work creations.

Viallet’s sugar syrup recipe is 6 cups cane sugar, 2 1/2 cups water, 10 ounces light corn syrup and a pinch of cream of tartar, boiled to 312 degrees. He adds liquid food coloring at about 284 degrees and brushes off the sugar crystals that form on the insides of the pot with a pastry brush and fresh water. When the syrup is sufficiently cooked, which takes 20 minutes, Viallet dips the pot in a cold water bath and sets it aside three or four minutes before working it.

He works on a wood surface spread with aluminum foil, where he lays out his molds for pouring the sugar. He uses both stainless steel pastry cutters and neoprene (synthetic rubber) mats that he cuts with an Exacto knife into stencil-like shapes (see “Where to Shop”). Sometimes, though, he’ll simply pour a drop of sugar syrup onto the foil and let it take its own shape.

Viallet then sprinkles edible gold powder over the sugar or mixes in liquid whitener. These create the mirror-like, marbled effect that makes Viallet’s work so beautiful. In 10 to 15 minutes, the neoprene mats and cutters can be removed with a sharp kitchen knife or by hand and the solidified sugar can be used for trays or decorative pieces.

Once, when he worked at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, Viallet prepared 32 banquet centerpieces using this method. On each base he placed an authentic-looking piece of fruit that he created from blown sugar. It took him 36 hours. No problem, Viallet now says with a shrug, adding, “They’re really pieces of art.”

The same certainly could be said of Viallet’s magnificent poured sugar reproductions of Matisse’s “Blue Woman with Flowing Hair” and Picasso’s “Acrobat.” Viallet made both using neoprene mat stencils based on reproductions of the paintings he found in art books.

Finally, there’s Viallet’s bubble sugar, which is made by pouring hot sugar syrup over parchment paper that has been treated with rubbing alcohol or vodka (rubbing alcohol if it’s not to be eaten afterward; vodka if it is). The contact between the alcohol and the hot sugar produces tiny, glistening bubbles. If the sugar syrup wasn’t already colored, Viallet will often add color with an airbrush. In the past, he has used this effect to represent the bubbles in a three-dimensional life-size aquarium made entirely of sugar.

Viallet worries, though, about what he calls the “manual profession” of sugar work and whether it will last. He’s disturbed that fewer and fewer pastry chefs and confectioners are practicing what he learned in Paris 20 years ago.

So he and Wressell have taken sugar-work courses from Ewald Notter, the Maryland confectionery school founder, determined to continue working with the hot, syrupy medium that seems to suit them best. Viallet even talks of opening his own pastry school soon, offering sugar-work lessons of his own.

Shan Ichiyanagi, meanwhile, is teaching the Japanese amezaiku tradition to his young apprentice and cousin. Without smoke and mirrors or a trick rabbit and hat, he, Wressell and Viallet are proving sugar work to be its own sweet reward.

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Where to Shop

Look for sugar-work ingredients and supplies in any good grocery, restaurant supply or cooking store. Neoprene mats and liquid whitener are available from the International School of Confectionary Arts.

Albert Uster Imports Inc., (800) 231-8154 (mail-order only).

Gloria’s Cake & Candy Supplies, 3755 Sawtelle Blvd., Los Angeles, (310) 391-4557.

International School of Confectionary Arts, (301) 963-9077 (mail-order only).

Surfas Restaurant Supply & Gourmet Food, 8825 National Blvd., Culver City, (310) 559-4770.