Simple Syrup, or adventures with knefe

On a recent episode of Mike Colamecco's Food Show on public television, Wylie Dufresne of WD-50 was asked to explain the genesis of modern "scientific" cooking, or what others have called molecular gastronomy.  His point was telling: although he was a perfectly good traditional chef, he became frustrated by the somewhat stilted explanations he received to his questions about technique, which didn't go much further than assurances that one roasted a chicken in this or that way because it worked.  With the help of Harold McGee and others, Dufresne and Achatz and the Spanish chefs have exposed many of the answers to Dufresne's questions, and manipulated those traditional methods of cookery to produce new foods.  Funnily enough, what Dufresne didn't recognize in the clip I saw is that his inquisitive methods are now simply being aped, precisely the same way the traditional chef's methods have been aped for centuries.  That is, unless you think that the thousands of chefs making ice cream with liquid nitrogen know anything more than some vague pap about smaller ice crystals. 

In any case, I'm not a professional chef, but something that Dufresne said in the interview with respect to bistro owners resonated with me.  As he put it, sure, it's nice to make fancy molecular food, but the bistro owner wanting to make the same perfect fries every time has an equivalent interest in scientific cooking.  It occurs to me that on a very small scale, so does the home cook. 

An example: Knefe bil jows is a dessert consisting of two layers of shredded phyllo (aka, kataifi) sandwiching a layer of walnuts, sugar, and cinnamon, all doused while hot with cool syrup.  The nightmare scenario for any home cook is when your sugar syrup crystalizes, leaving you with grainy, unpleasant, knefe with the mouth feel of fudge gone wrong.  For most Armenian/Lebanese/Syrian cooks, crystallization is a calamity with about the predictability of a flood or tornado, but with less warning.  Suddenly, apparently from nowhere, your sugar seizes up, whether in the pan, in the jar while cooling, or even when thrown onto the pastry.  The dessert everyone has been looking forward to is ruined.  In the meantime, the traditional prophylactics are about as logical at first glance as the tiger's paw a tribal witch doctor might prescribe.  Lemon, cream of tartar, or honey, in varying amounts, thrown into the syrup while stirring, or not stirring, or while cooling.   These methods work, just like the traditional method for roasting chicken usually works, but capriciously, and with no guarantees.

And here, of course, is the point.  Science can explain how to keep your sugar syrup from crystallizing, and in fact the whole process is very well known and entirely commonplace.  And yet, generations of middle eastern cooks are left making knefe in terror, or, like some of my family, not making knefe at all, because the whole thing might be carried off at a moment's notice by whatever the cooking equivalent of gremlins might be.  I do not except myself.  While I've read McGee's chapter on sugar syrups twice now, I'm still worried the thing might crystallize the second I throw it onto the phyllo.  

Maybe I'll figure it out with one more read. 

PS: Science tells us that honey, cream of tartar and lemon work because they impede crystallization by inverting the sucrose, and allowing the cook more time to "cool the syrup into a clear candy".  What I don't understand entirely is whether I read McGee correctly to say that crystals can form in sugar syrup at any temperature above 212 F, or whether my failed syrups have all failed because I let them go above 235 F into the fudgey stage.