Why does cotton candy melt in your mouth

Is it its taste, how it feels in your mouth—or both? Cooks and food scientists study how substances dissolve or melt to create a unique and pleasant sensation in the mouth and optimize the release of flavor.

Would you like to know how your favorite candy works? In this science activity you will study two types of candy and discover what makes them so enjoyable. Background The digestion of food is one big chemical process. It starts in our mouths where saliva—a watery liquid—surrounds the food.

Saliva helps us to chew and swallow food and contains a small quantity of enzymes, or chemicals that help break down our food.

How a food interacts with saliva will influence how it tastes as well as how it feels in the mouth. Will it dissolve, will it melt or will it just be chomped into pieces by our teeth? Whether a solid dissolves when surrounded by water depends on how strong the internal bonds are and how eager it is to bond with water. For example, to dissolve sugar in water, bonds between sugar molecules the tiniest sugar particles and between water molecules the tiniest water particles must be broken.

This requires energy. Luckily the creation of new bonds between sugar and water releases enough energy to break those bonds so sugar can dissolve in water. If the released energy is less than the energy required, however, the solid will not dissolve. Temperature plays a role as well. Adding heat means adding energy—and for most solids the hotter the water, the easier and faster it is to dissolve the solid.

Heated molecules move around more so the dissolved substance will disperse more quickly than in unheated water. Hard rock candies, such as fruit drops, are mainly crystalized sugar that dissolve when surrounded by saliva. For soft candy, such as gummy bears, gelatin is often used to create their particular texture.

Gelatin is derived from collagen, which is a structural protein found in all animals. Gelatin protein gets tangled when cooked, creating mesh pockets that trap water and other ingredients. After gelatin cools the proteins remained tangled and provide structure that holds many desserts or candies together. For most types of gelatin, their melting point is below body temperature, so they melt in the mouth and provide unique sensations.

Observations and results Did you see that the hard candies dissolved in cold water whereas the gummy bears puffed up? Did hot water dissolve the hard candies faster whereas the gummy bears started to melt in the hot water? Hard candy is often made primarily of sugar, corn syrup and other substances that dissolve easily in water. You stick it in your mouth and let it dissolve.

The reason cotton candy melts in your mouth is because all it is, is plain sugar. Sugar, sugar and more sugar. Now try this experiment, and it will prove my theory. Get about 3 tablespoons of sugar and put it in a bowl. Then put warm water on top of the sugar and you will start to see that the sugar is melting. Same with cotton candy. Once you put it in your mouth, it melts because of the warmth and pretty much because it's all sugar.

No the paticles in cotton wont allow it to melt unless in a very most very heated inviorment. Cotton candy is a form of spun sugar. The machine used to make cotton candy consists of a small bowl, into which sugar is poured. The sugar bowl is spun at high speed while heaters near the rim melt the sugar, which is squeezed out through tiny holes by centrifugal force.

It's melting point is lower than your body temperature. No cotton cannot melt, but it can burn. One does not simply, melt candy. Cotton Candy and sugar. Fluffy sugar that melts in your mouth.

Its so good! Log in. Cotton Candy. Regardless, since I was not savouring the taste like all the other kids around, my mind was free to wander and it came upon the strange sensation of cotton candy melting in my mouth. To be honest, I had not realised that it was melting. What young-me knew was that no matter how big a bite I took, within seconds it would shrink and vanish into almost nothingness in my mouth.

Subsequently, it was this phenomenon that entertained me when I ate candy floss. The solution to this is to understand what exactly cotton candy is.

It is actually just sugar that has been melted and drawn into strings. What the cotton candy machine does is it heats sugar and other additives and colourings in the hop in the middle till it becomes liquid.

Then, it spins the liquid sugar mixture such that drops get flung outwards through the perforations in the hop, like when you spin a sopping, wet towel over your head and the water flies everywhere. As the mixture is quite viscous, instead of separating and become drops, the sugar gets stretched and spun into threads. The machine operator then collects and wraps these threads on a stick, or into bags, and we get that fluffy thing.

Just as granulated sugar dissolves in water, what actually happens when you eat cotton candy is the sweet dissolves in your saliva. Surrounding the mouth of the hopper is a ring pierced with minuscule holes; surrounding that is a big metal receptacle a lot like an oversized cake pan. As the heating element melts the sugar into a liquid, a motor sets the whole contraption spinning. The fairground favourite has almost unique chemical properties Credit: Getty Images.

A fringe of liquid sugar, not even really visible to the naked eye in videos of the process, shoots out of the hopper onto the ring. There, it's flung by the force of the spin through the tiny holes, emerging onto the other side as a bunch of nearly invisible threads. While the mass of sugar starts out molten, being split into so many little pieces gives it much greater surface area than before — much more of it is exposed to the cooler air — and so it goes from being liquid to being solid in an instant.

The resulting sugar cobweb collects all around the inside of the big pan, and you can use a paper cone to lift it out and wrap it up into the familiar pouf. Candyfloss machines make this process relatively simple, but long before they existed confectioners were still trying to get something like this to happen to sugar.

Then you return with the knife to pick up another strand, continuing as long as the sugar remains molten — hopefully long enough for you to get enough sugar threads wrapped around your mold to make a nice web or nest to put delicacies in.