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I'm trying to make Turkish delight with apple juice concentrate and tapioca starch instead of refined sugar and cornstarch. However, I haven't been able to get the consistency for two times, it becomes more viscous and spreads. In fact, after adding tapioca starch, it thickens very quickly, at this stage I thought that I shouldn't cook for a long time as with cornstarch, because tapioca is more unstable to heat? What do you think, is there a way to get a stable Turkish delight by changing these two main ingredients?

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    Welcome to the site. Please take a tour and visit the help center for information on what makes a good question. Please edit your question with details on the recipe. In this case it will make it easier for us to work out what might be going wrong. I think we would also need to know the sugar concentration in the apple juice.
    – bob1
    Nov 30, 2021 at 21:28
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    A key word is apple juice concentrate. Without knowing how concentrated it is, we can only speculate
    – Chris H
    Dec 1, 2021 at 11:08
  • Thank you , I used 3/4 cup of concentrate instead of 1 cup of sugar as in the instructions of the product I used. I used to use it in this way in cakes and pudding before, but it did not give the consistency I wanted in Turkish delight. :/
    – Nida
    Dec 1, 2021 at 11:31

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The tapioca starch shouldn't be that much of a problem. It has a very slightly different texture than cornstarch, but it produces the same firmness. The end result is only slightly gummier, in many cases imperceptebly so.

What won't work is the apple juice concentrate. Turkish delight is a type of candy; it is made out of sugar. The apple juice has nowhere enough sugar for that, it is still mostly water (I found a nutrition facts label stating it only has 38 g of sugar per 100 g). And the sugar in it is not sucrose, but fructose, which has a different consistency. Worse yet, it may also contain other stuff such as pectin, which will further do weird things to the final texture. So that is a big no-no. Even if you were using pure refined fructose, you couldn't expect to substitute it for sucrose (table sugar) and get the same results.

So, in the end, you are quite free in your choice of starch, but the sugar has to stay, and in the exact amount as prescribed in the recipe, you cannot reduce it either. I cannot think of a product that will work well as a substitute. If the "white" sugar is what you object to, you could use brown sugar - the amount of molasses used to color it is so miniscule, it won't interfere with the candy-making process, beside giving you a bit of a discoloration.

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  • Thank you very much. I actually thought that tapioca starch is not suitable for high temperature like cornstarch. because first the mixture becomes too solid, prevents mixing, and then it takes on a lighter consistency than cornstarch with temperature. Does using liquid sweetener affect it that much? I used 3/4 cup of apple juice concantrate for 1 cup of sugar as it is written in the information about the sweetener.
    – Nida
    Dec 1, 2021 at 11:37
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    The temperature for setting starch is very consistent, there shouldn't be a problem there. The juice is absolutley a big problem. The information about it is probably meant for cases where you want to use it as a sweetener. Here, you are not sweetening the Turkish delight, you are making candy. A cup of sugar is 190 grams, so you would need at least 500 g of your apple juice to get the same amount of solid sugars. But even if you did that, the larger problem is that your recipe is made for 190 g of sucrose, and you will be using 190 g of fructose, which does not act at all the same.
    – rumtscho
    Dec 1, 2021 at 12:29
  • Yes, you're absolutely right, thank you very much!
    – Nida
    Dec 2, 2021 at 7:18
  • OP, I don't know where you got the information that tapioca starch is not suitable for high temperatures, because that's absolutely not true. In fact, tapioca starch is MORE resistant to prolonged exposure to high temperatures than cornstarch Dec 3, 2021 at 16:38

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