Candy & Sugar Stages Calculator

Identify the candy stage of boiling sugar from a thermometer reading, or find the target temperature for a stage you want — both adjusted for altitude. Sugar syrup passes through seven named stages as its temperature (and concentration) climb: thread, soft ball, firm ball, hard ball, soft crack, hard crack, and caramel. Because the boiling point of water falls with altitude, the whole scale shifts down by the same amount, so a high-altitude recipe reaches hard crack at a lower temperature than a sea-level one. Enter your thermometer reading to name the stage, or pick a stage to get its altitude-corrected target range. Useful for fudge, caramels, nougat, toffee, brittle, lollipops and spun sugar. Pure arithmetic — the stage boundaries are long-standing culinary conventions and the altitude rule is the usual 1 °F per 500 ft (1 °C per 285 m); a candy thermometer and a cold-water test beat the number, so use this as a guide. Everything runs locally in your browser.