Help my caramels flopped

[caramelwomen]

I made caramels friday night, they were perfect as well as yesterday. I went to try one today (sunday) and they turned into this fudgey sugary form. They were not longer chewey and stringy.

[bushwickgirl]

1) Did you use a recipe with corn syrup? Corn syrup adds sweetness to the caramel and a lack of moisture the corn syrup brings to the recipe, or too much sugar in the mix, will cause your mixture to become grainy (sugary). A tipical ratio of corn syrup and water to sugar is 1:1 or even higher.
2) Did you use the "wet" or "dry" method of carmelizing the sugar? If you used the "wet" method, did you wash down the sides of your pot with a brush dipped in water? This is important, as even one undissolved sugar crystal can cause a chain reaction causing more sugar crystals to reform, which will make the caramel grainy. Or just keep your pot covered, as the condensation generated from the heat in the pot will wash the sugar crystals on the sides of the pot back into the dissolving sugar. If you used the "dry" method, do not stir the sugar while it's caramelizing; you run the risk of not having the crystals dissolve completely and developing grainy caramel. The graininess can take a while to develop, so your caramels might be great at first, then turn sugary a day or so later.
3) Cooking the caramel at too high a heat and with too little moisture in the recipe will result in a "long" caramel, which is too chewy and stringy, which you mentioned, and actually caramels are not supposed to be stringy. They should be just nicely chewy, not too soft and and not too hard and shouldn't stick to the teeth.
4) You cooked the caramel to 246-248*? How is your thermometer? Have you calibrated it? Put in in a pot of boiling water and check the temp; if it's off by 5-10 degrees, then you didn't cook the caramel enough and it will be grainy. Undercooking (240* or closer to that) will give you a softer, stringy caramel and closer to 250* will give you a chewier, but still soft, caramel.
5) How did you store your caramels? They need to be well wrapped, in a low moisture environment. Did you measure your ingredients very carefully? Candymaking is science with chemical reactions involved and careful measuring is very important. Have you made caramels before and they were ok? Or this is the first time?
From what you described, you may have two issues going on, undercooked caramel and undissolved sugar crystals in the mix.

Here's a link for a very good basic recipe I've used with no problems, compare it to your's (or maybe you're using this one:)

http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/foo...

Without seeing your recipe and knowing what method you used, I could only offer these suggestions.
So, to recap my points: undissolved sugar crystals in the caramel, too high heat, too little moisture in the recipe, not cooking to proper temperature, thermometer not calibrated properly, measuring mistakes. I hope one of these suggestions helps.

[bushwickgirl]

Jeez, I wonder how it worked out, OP never reposted.