a southern sweetness
toffee making with Anne keller

We've carried Anne Keller's chocolate-covered toffee at Zingerman's for three or four years. I remember the afternoon her first tin arrived. We usually hold samples in a not-well-concealed box, waiting for our tasting meetings. Ari, Toni and I get together with whomever else is around and taste through the new foods to see if any of them make our cut. Most don't. But Anne's toffee was a little different--it never got formally tasted. It never even made it to the box. I opened a tin because I was both curious and confounded by her persistence. She'd rang a half dozen times asking if we'd sell it. I took a bite, thought it was pretty good. But then I really like toffee--it's about the only sweet that makes me excited--so I thought I might have a bias. Without thinking, I left the tin open on my desk. The drive-by snacking staff in our office finished the rest of it off in 45 minutes, before I'd noticed. It was the fastest product half-life I'd ever witnessed. I asked them what they thought. "If we don't carry this, we're idiots" everyone agreed.

We've been selling Anne's toffee ever since. This spring, on a trip to visit old friends in North Carolina, I gave her a ring to see if my friend John and I might stop by to watch her make some toffee. Anne told me on the phone, "I'm really out in the boondocks" and it didn't feel like she was kidding. A half hour north of Durham, we'd turned off onto a dirt road that curved through enough pines to blot out the sun. We located her white house and its little toffee factory in a small clearing. It wasn't far from the main road, as it turns out, but it seemed very far from places where things move fast. As we walked across her lawn, the only sound I could hear was the buzz of insects that's like perpetual 3 degree background radiation down south. A hound's howl broke the silent buzz. Anne popped her head out of a window and greeted us at the door with a hug a big "HAH!" of a laugh. "You found us! Good!" and quickly took us in--the toffee day had already begun.

Although toffee has been around a long time--the English are probably the most famous for enjoying it--Anne hasn't even been making it for a decade. Before starting her second career as a one-woman toffee tornado, she was an critical care nurse who got burnt out and "run out" in the HMO revolution. She didn't seem far from the OR in her toffee factory: the room was clean and white, her bright purple work clothes and hair cap looked like scrubs she might wear in a hospital run by Willy Wonka.

She made her first batch of toffee in 1997 from an Aunt's old recipe. Her husband, "Who's rather big anyway HAH HAH! was never excited by food HAH! but his pupils dilated when he tasted this." That made her think she might be onto something. Nervous, she took an early batch--before she had a business plan or any other ideas--to Michael Barefoot, the founder of A Southern Season (a great food store to visit if you're ever near Chapel Hill). She was hoping he might offer her advice on how she could improve it, whether it was a good idea. Instead he asked when she could deliver an order.

Taking notes, I barely heard the last part because somewhere between "HAH" and "deliver an order" Anne had mentioned that, besides dilated pupils and the farsightedness to marry an ambitious woman who would later make sweets all day long, her husband had a 1965 convertible red GTO in the garage out back. "CAR...for sale?" I note, somewhat dreamily.

The growing sweet butterscotch scent of toffee cooking brought me back to business. In a cool, surprisingly small two-room factory (in total, about the size of a typical living room), Anne returned to her post by the only piece of technology I could see: a bubbling stainless steel cauldron filled with dark cane sugar and butter. The machine had a big, mechanical wand stirring its brew like a robotic witch. Keeping one eye on the temperature gauge and one on the molten toffee, she told us how she makes her candy.

"The recipe for making toffee is pretty simple. You cook sugar and butter to a certain temperature, then pour it onto a pan and let it cool. That's about it," she said. But as anyone who's made other "simple" recipes like biscuits knows, the results can be maddeningly inconsistent, success painfully elusive. Sugar has a magical relationship with heat, morphing into all sorts of different forms as if under a spell as its temperature rises. To me, sugar's states read like a set of undiscovered baseball statistics: thread, soft ball, firm ball, hard ball, soft crack, hard crack. Anne has to catch her pot of sweet lava somewhere around 300 degrees, just on the verge of hard crack. Too soon and it'll be too soft. Too late, too hard.

She also has to watch out for the other enemy of toffee's texture: mixture consistency. "If there's one sugar crystal hanging around when I stop the cooking and pour this out, the toffee will be like gingerbread. It'll never harden. I don't know why, it just won't.," she told me as she wiped the edge of her cauldron with a brush dipped in cool water, a process meant to dissolve any renegade sugar crystals who think they're going to spend time on the cauldron's cooler rim and not mix and melt with the rest.

There are other problems to catch as well. If the air is too moist, the toffee won't have its trademark crisp crackle. "We try to keep the humidity down more than anything else. And that's hard in North Carolina!" I checked the gauge she had on the wall. It read 32%. Outside the air conditioned lab it was only April but felt wet on the skin, like Michigan in July. Summer must be a challenge for southern air conditioning units.

The last big problem Anne had to cope with was how to cool the toffee quickly. If you've made toffee at home, you haven't probably had much of a problem with this. You pour your small batch out onto a baking sheet, it cools and hardens in a few minutes, no big whoop. Cooling becomes a problem when you've got to pour out enough toffee to cover a 3 by 6 foot table almost a half-inch deep. Anne had some clever rig to cool the toffee that she was rightly proud of. "I could have bought a $10,000 table to cool the toffee but I had a $150 pan and $300 wood table made and with a few tins to prop it up and a couple fans and it works fine." The big heavy pan of toffee gets lifted off the table a bit by the tins, and a small squad of $5 clip-on fans cool it from several angles.

All the matters of science and recipe aside, if you don't make a simple food from great ingredients all your techniques won't amount to much flavor. While the toffee cooled, I checked out Anne's ingredient pantry. Cane sugar and real butter, Guittard chocolate and hazelnuts and walnuts bought straight from their farms in Oregon and California. She caught me looking. "I'm still trying to find local pecans," she said. "It seems like it shouldn't be so hard to find a local nut, but I have an easier time getting hazelnuts from Oregon than I do pecans from around the corner."

In about 5 minutes, the toffee had cooled enough for Anne to scare the crap out of me. She whipped out a 3 foot metal rolling pin whose mid-section was divided into a series of round metal blades. It looked like medieval baking torture, but its use was benign: it scored the toffee into even pieces. She rolled the pin lengthwise down the table of toffee, then cross-wise. 20-or-so minutes later it was hard enough to start breaking. We cracked the big sheet of sweet together, making a lot of racket and eating the oddly shaped "scrap" pieces as we went. Anne says this is the only time she'll eat toffee anymore--when it's still warm and you're cracking it. I agreed, it was excellent. John had never had her toffee before. I looked at him to see what he thought. His eyes had rolled up inside his head. I thought to myself, what would childhood have been like if mom made candy for a living?

After breaking and some pretty dedicated nibbling, we had about 25 lbs of toffee in a couple large buckets. Next, Anne set to enrobing the toffee with chocolate on two enrobing machines. One is for the milk chocolate with walnuts, the other for my favorite, dark chocolate with hazelnuts. In a moment of unexpected culinary surrealism, I learned the twin machines are operated by a set of twins, Linda and Angel, Anne's only hired help in the toffee lab. Linda was enrobing the milk chocolate, Angel the dark. I wanted to ask if they ever switched machines and in my mind they would turn and reply "Yes," at the same time. They were dressed in identical purple scrubs and each operated a simple rube goldberg of a machine that liquefied chocolate, collected an army of toffee pieces in a hopper and individually lacquered them in oozing chocolate. Then it sent them marching down a two foot long conveyor until they fell onto a slowly spinning flat wheel covered in nuts. With small, 4-tined forks, Linda and Angel silently flipped toffee pieces over and over on the spinning nut wheel, coating them. The radio played quietly and there was a sunny view through a hedge of blooming flowers across the lawn to what looked like a vintage Camaro. I wondered how I'd missed it when I'd parked and made another "for sale?" note.

Like any entrepreneur, Anne has to wear a lot of hats, do lots of jobs. And like many food entrepreneur's I've met, she's got a manic, cheerful energy that's infectious. At one point she jumped up from breaking toffee to answer the phone, with a "Hey baby wassup!" and write down an order on the wall next to, what I recognized, as my phone number and time of arrival. "Who was that," I asked. "Oh, a customer, they want a couple cases." "Great!" I said, my mail order box packing blood rising. "Can I see how you ship it?" "We haven't made it yet," she replied, with an air of obviousness that made me feel a bit dumb. She's right--I hadn't seen any cases of toffee tins anywhere. I just figured she had 'em stored somewhere else. "We make your toffee when you order it, honey!" I smiled. Probably lots of people tell her she's crazy when she says that. And when a great ice storm came last December and she was out of power for a week and rigged a generator to make our order and brought it herself to Durham to shop because UPS wouldn't come out to her "boondocks" she probably felt crazy. I didn't feel she was crazy. I felt kinship. We do the same kind of "crazy" stuff at Zingerman's, like cutting cheese to order and delivering customer's last-minute orders to the FedEx station. I also felt good that I'd left that tin open on my desk 4 years ago. I bit another piece of toffee. My eyes rolled back into my head.