That one time we made marshmallows

Several years ago…I’m thinking 2013-ish. Stina and I got the idea to make marshmallow at the bakery. This was before I had a team and shortly after we moved into our current space. At the time our space was huge and we had so much room.

I had a “giant” 60 quart mixer so we thought we’d make a giant batch of marshmallow. Giant batch meaning it would probably make 1-2 full sheet pans. At that time that was huge for us.

So how you make marshmallow is like this: You heat up sugar, gelatin and I think some recipes call for corn syrup, click here for Alton Brown’s recipe… You heat the sugar mixture until it’s crazy boiling hot - like really hot, like lava hot, you use a candy thermometer kind of hot. Then you dump (carefully pour) it into a stand mixer and beat it until its fluffy. Mind you it’s crazy boiling hot.

SO we make the boiling sticky hot mixture (mess) and carefully pour it into the 60-quart mixer and turn the mixer on. And nothing - it doesn’t even reach the beater bar. We’d made, what we though was a giant pot of marshmallow lava and it didn’t even come high enough in the 60-quart bowl to mix it. SO we then poured this hot marshmallow lava into the little mixer bowl. I think we had to do it in a couple batches because it was too much for the little mixer but clearly not enough for giant mixer.

We were laughing so hard at our stupidity, we didn’t care - we were just excited about making marshmallows. Luckily this batch was just for us - we were test batching to see if we could do this on a larger scale. Clearly not. It was way too much trouble than we thought it would be.

I can’t remember if we burnt ourselves on the marshmallow lava, if we did the craziness of the situation drown that out. We had marshmallow to share with our families for a while.

Marshmallows are gluten free - but a little too fancy for us. If you’d like to make them at home, use a 5-6 qt stand mixer and make sure you take pictures of your adventure and send them to me. I don’t think I took a single picture to document this adventure of ours. :)