Liquorice (also spelled licorice) is a popular candy that is flavored from an extract of the root of the liquorice plant. In the U.S., real liquorice is generally called “black liquorice,” to distinguish it from similar types of candy which are not actually flavored at all with the root that gives it its name. Those types of candy are similar in appearance, though often red, and come in ropes or tubes or coil.
Basic liquorice comes down to three ingredients: Some form of sugar, extract from the liquorice root, and what’s called a ‘binder.’ A binder in this case is just something to thicken the whole mixture together and give it some kind of shape and sticky togetherness. The binder could be some variety of starch, flour, gum or gelatin, or even a combination of those ingredients. Some liquorice even contains beeswax, which sounds pretty gross to me. Apparently that gives it a shiny surface, but if somebody asked me I’d be like hey, why don’t we leave out the shininess and also indredients that come from a bug or are wax?
In case you want to make liquorice yourself–which I assume is why you’re reading this–just dissolve all these ingredients and water and heat them to like 250 degrees. Then to get the desired shape, pour that how mixture into the mold of the shape of your choice. Be sure to put some kind of starch into that container first, though, or something bad will happen. Once the candy is dry just spray that bad boy with some nasty beeswax, which you might as well do anyway because liquorice is probably the one type of candy thats begs more than any other to just be purchased and taken home and opened and thrown immediately into the garbage, beeswax or no.
Apparently the actual extract from the root contains glycyrrhizin, which is more than fifty times sweeter and sucrose. Some of the properties of this natural sweetener include loosening phlegm and mucus in the lungs and chest through coughing, and rasiing a person’s blood pressure. It will also make you run to the latrine to do number two.
Rumor has it that Alexander the Great gave his troops rations of this root while they were marching in order to quench their thirsts. Too bad he liked that other dude in that movie they made about him. And if you think it made your doots green, that’s probable because of artificial colorings, not the extract itself.
Popular has become red licorice, which isn’t really licorice at all because it does not contain the root. Generally it is made with raspberry, cherry, or strawberry flavorings, andi s sol as Twizzlers or Red Vines. But it still doesn’t taste good.
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