How do Pop Rocks candy work?

Hard candy (like a lollypop or a Jolly Rancher) is made from sugar, corn syrup, water and flavoring. Check out our HowStuffWorks article to learn how conventional candy is combined with carbon dioxide to produce Pop Rocks.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
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(00:22):
Brain with today's question. How do pop rocks candies work?
It's definitely a technology candy. Nothing in nature works like
pop rocks do, so how do they work? One of
the funny things about pop rocks is that they're patented.
That means you can go and read the patent and
see exactly how they work. Here's the basic idea. Hard

(00:44):
candy like a lollipop, is made from sugar, corn syrup,
water and flavoring. You heat the ingredients together and boil
the mixture to drive off all the water. Then you
let the temperature rise. What you're left with is a
pure sugar syrup at about three undred degrees fahrenheit. When
it cools, you have hard candy. To make pop rocks,

(01:05):
the hot sugar mixture is allowed to mix with carbon
dioxide gas at about six hundred pounds per square inch
inside a pressurized container, the carbon dioxide gas forms tiny
six P s I bubbles in the candy. Once it cools,
you release the pressure in the candy shatters, but the
pieces still contain the high pressure bubbles. Look at a

(01:27):
piece of pop Rocks candy with a magnifying glass and
you can see those little bubbles. When you put the
candy in your mouth, it melts just like any hard
candy wood, and it releases the bubbles. What you're hearing
and feeling is the six d p s i carbon
dioxide gas being released from each bubble. Do you have
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(01:50):
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