Corn syrup, according to Sweet Stuff: An American History of Sweeteners from Sugar to Sucralose by Deborah Jean Warner, was invented all the way back in 1811 by German-born chemist Gottlieb Kirchhoff, who was working in St. Petersburg, Russia. He converted potato starch into sugar by heating it with sulfuric acid—the acid broke down the starch’s chain of molecules, converting it into glucose. In the 1860s Americans took up Kirchoff’s method to use with their plentiful corn crops. By 1881, 11 million bushels of corn were being processed for glucose in the country, and regional manufacturers were popping up all over. It wasn’t until 1903 that a national corn syrup company came onto the scene: Karo, the name most synonymous with corn syrup today. By the 1930s, Americans used a billion pounds of corn syrup—most of it in confections—annually. Even then, savvy capitalists, then promoting cane syrup, were looking to make false distinctions between so-called artificial and natural ingredients. These days upmarket soda companies will proudly print “cane syrup” across their glass bottles—you’ll see no such branding for corn syrup even if the two syrups aren’t all that different.
“I think there's just a ton of marketed stigmatization around it and then a lot of pseudoscience as well,” says pastry chef Dana Cree, author of Hello, My Name Is Ice Cream. “The corn syrup that we buy in the store is all glucose molecules.” High fructose corn syrup, on the other hand, is corn syrup that is processed so that some of the glucose converts into fructose. Either way, corn products and manufactured ingredients both got a bad rap. Michael Pollan’s 2006 blockbuster The Omnivore’s Dilemma helped make the case to the American public that the prevalence of corn in supermarket products was unhealthy. Around the same time, functional health advocates began decrying the use of HFCS and other ingredients that weren’t “whole foods,” arguing “if you can’t pronounce it...then don’t eat it”—even if our bodies break down ingredients with similar chemical compositions, no matter their origin, all the same. Certainly, some of the issue may be that it is tucked into all sorts of products—salad dressings, chips, crackers, and so forth—so that consumers end up inadvertently increasing their sugar intake overall by eating products made with it.
The murky discourse around corn, corn syrup, and HFCS is a shame. Because corn syrups—namely the iconic Karo light and dark corn syrups—have wonderful properties for all kinds of homemade desserts. In ice cream, sugar bonds with some of the water and depresses the freezing point, so that not all the water in the ice cream hardens, keeping the ice cream softer. We often think of sugar as the white crystals we sprinkle into coffee, but there are a range of sugars. Table sugar is sucrose, which is a complex sugar also known as a disaccharide (C12H22O11), made up of the simple sugars (or monosaccharides) of glucose and fructose. These two sugars have the same formula—C6H12O6—but their chemical arrangement is different, so fructose tastes sweeter. On a scale of relative sweetness—which is pegged against sucrose at 100—fructose is 110 and glucose is 74.
Compared to sucrose, glucose can bond to even more water, making ice cream extra soft without adding too much more sweetness. “Glucose is half as sweet as sugar, and it also is a different size, so there are twice as many sugar molecules by weight,” says Cree. “That allows us to bind twice as much water by adding half as much sugar that doesn’t impact the sweetness of the ice cream.” She also uses corn syrup in fudge and chocolate ribbons to keep them smooth and chewy—not rock hard—when swirled into ice cream.
