Pink Panther

Our Pink Panther hard-boiled sweets are made out of our basic mass, which is 20 kilograms of coarse sugar that is boiled almost to 180 degrees Celsius. This mass is, as all of our products, 100 % natural. This liquid golden sugar mass is poured onto our production table where the red colour is added to one half and black to the other. Our red colour is carmine, which comes from the carapace of the rutting crasille lice that are grown in greenhouses in South America. Its colour is much stronger than the colour from beet roots and it leaves no flavour.

Our black colour is activated charcoal, and the only reason that we dye our hard-boiled sweets with liquorice black is that people today think of liquorice as something black. Liquorice essence is black, since is changes its colour during the process of extraction, but the pure liquorice root is brown.

After the yellow and black colour has been added, the two liquid masses are folded until firmer. In this face, the sugar cools down from 180 degrees to about 110 degrees Celsius. Then the raspberry extract and wine acid is added to the red lump and liquorice powder and ammonium chloride powder is added to the black. The tartaric acid is added to counterbalance the very sweet sugar and give the raspberry part a balanced acidity that is found in natural raspberries.

The ammonium chloride is added to counterbalance the extremely sweet liquorice powder. Natural liquorice is about 50 times sweeter than cane sugar, which is why ammonium chloride is necessary to create balance and make the liquorice saltier.

The raspberry part is hurled onto a hook. By hurling the sugar mass, more air is thrown into the sugar, which makes the mass lighter and more vibrant in its colour while the flavour becomes milder and rounder.

Lastly, the liquorice part and the raspberry parts are made into one hard-boiled sweet. This lump is pulled out into long bars which take up all of the space on our production table. Here they are left to cool down. The long bars are then chopped with either a spatula or an open pair of scissors across an old sinker of 5 kilo grams. By chopping them this way the ends remain open, which makes the patterns or motives inside the hard-boiled sweet visible.

This hard-boiled sweet is perfect if you want a hard-boiled sweet with liquorice with a tad more acidity and edge in the flavour. Regardless if you are an out-and-out liquorice lover or new to the liquorice world, this hard-boiled sweet with liquorice is an absolute hit and one of our best-selling hard-boiled sweets.

Raspberry, Rubus idaeus, is an undershrub of the rose family, spread in most of Europe.

The origin of wild growing raspberries can be tracked back to East Asia, but some species began growing in North America. Raspberry grows wild in Europe, North America and Asia.

The first raspberry-plants were grown in the 16th century. The first mention of raspberries in the literature is from the middle of the 1500’s, and in the 18th century cross-breeding with different raspberry sorts was begun, and cultivating on a larger scale began in the 19th century. In USA violet and black raspberries are grown, while the light red variant is mostly known in Europe.

Both the Danish name hindbær and the German name Himbeere has, according to numerous Danish and German sources, a relation to a special animal that was thought to be especially fond of raspberries, namely the red deer, or more precisely the female red deer, which is called the hind.

Liquorice root is the dried root of the liquorice plant (Glycyrrhiza glabra), which grows wild and is grown in the Mediterranean, Iran, Russia, Turkey and China. The root grows as low as about 1 meter deep and it must be at least 3 years old before reaping.

The entire plant smells and tastes of liquorice due to its contents of potassium and calcium salt and glycyrrhicin acid. These glucosides have a sweetening effect which is 50 times as powerful as that of cane sugar. Furthermore, the plant also contains a wide range of other substances, including more casual aromatics like anethole and geraniol.

The extract of the liquorice root is usually used for manufacturing of liquorice, but at Sømods Bolcher we use the clean liquorice root in the hard-boiled sweets.