BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) – Note for cooks making candy: Romance aside, remember chemistry principles affect the candy-making process.

Sue Ann Bowling, associate professor of physics at the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, has studied the science of fudge.

In her article, “The Physical Chemistry of Making Fudge,” she writes: “There’s a lot of physical chemistry involved in making old-fashioned fudge. The recipe calls for combining and boiling milk, bitter chocolate or cocoa, and sugar together until the temperature of the syrup reaches 238 degrees, pouring the seething mixture into a bowl, cooling to 115 degrees, and then beating until the surface shine disappears.”

Bowling gives a detailed scientific explanation of the combination of sugar with the other ingredients to come up with the following “cautions” to prevent a “coarse, gritty mass instead of creamy fudge:”

• You must wash down the sides of the pot with a wet pastry brush early in the cooking process or put a lid on the pan for about 3 minutes to remove any sugar crystals clinging to the walls of the pot.

• You must not scrape the pot when you are pouring the candy into the bowl in which it is to be cooled because you might scrap in a stray sugar crystal.

• After the candy is removed from heat, do not disturb it until it is cooled.

• Don’t let anything, even a speck of dust, fall into the cooling candy. Even a speck of dust can cause the fudge to crystallize.