The Cooking of Sugar

La cuisson du sucre (the cooking of sugar) teaches one hard truth: sugar remembers every stray crystal. Keep the pan walls clean, stop stirring once the boil begins, and a clear syrup climbs cleanly from petit filet to caramel. Leave one grain clinging above the syrup and the whole batch can turn to sand.

The original entry assumed loaf sugar that needed skimming, a responsive copper saucepan, and a pastry cook stationed at the stove to test boiling syrup with fingers and teeth. Your home batch uses refined granulated sugar, a heavy pale stainless-steel pan, a clipped thermometer, and cold-water tests made with a spoon. Skimming was scaffolding for less-refined sugar and can usually go; clean pan walls, the original sequence, and exact stopping temperatures are the technique itself and must stay. This changes the equipment and removes an unsafe test, not the intent. One cook, one stove, one evening.

Choose your stopping point before the heat begins, because the stages arrive within minutes of one another. You aren't collecting all seven from one pan; you're learning the ladder, then stopping each batch where its next preparation requires. The step that decides everything is washing every crystal from the pan wall before the syrup concentrates.