When planning my overland drive from Boston to New Orleans, I included a long stopover in Pittsburgh to visit relatives on both sides of the family. All of my surviving grandparents live in the area along with a number of aunts, uncles, and cousins and I wanted to see everyone again before I left. After all, I’ll be out of the country for God knows how long starting tomorrow!

In addition to meeting relatives I haven’t seen in years (I imagine it isn’t often that college seniors are told how tall they’ve gotten) and letting the grandparents in on my plans for safety and security in the upcoming eighteen months there were a few serendipitous candy-related moments. An aunt had plans to visit a Somerset county maple syrup farm the day after I would have left, but snow delayed me a day so I could tag along as part of the personalized tour. Also, my grandmother on my mother’s side was able to arrange for someone to watch my grandfather so that she could visit a local candy-maker’s factory with my sister and I. Business and pleasure: a visit to relatives and a trip to local Pennsylvania candy legends!

The maple syrup tour, arranged by Everett Sechler of Sechler’s Sugar Shack, featured an in-depth explanation of maple syrup production with a Somerset County twist. In Western Pennsylvania, Germans carried the tradition and much of the terminology to the New World, leading to “keelers” rather than “sap buckets.” Also the different types of trees and different weather conditions make for a darker, richer flavored maple syrup than the thinner, lighter syrups from Quebec and Vermont. Mr. Sechler claimed that the people who actually make maple syrup up North prefer the Pennsylvania dark amber syrup when they eat it, as the taste is much stronger!

Surprisingly, the actual production facility in Somerset was much more modern than the Quebec cabane e sucre I visited. The sap runs directly from the trees through rubber tubing to a collection vat, and then it is put through an expensive reverse osmosis machine to remove most of the water. I believe this is because we visited a very small-scale Quebec sugar shack, where the focus is really on tourism and Sunday brunch dinners. Of course, I’m not 100% certain as in Quebec, they were speaking French!

What most people don’t realize is that the majority of the maple syrup Americans consume is actually fake syrup. Consisting of corn syrup and maple flavoring, the sticky “Pancake Syrup” bears little resemblance to real maple syrup. However, with the growing importance of organic food, real maple syrup sales are going up. This tendency towards more natural foods has also positively impacted the sales of the darker maple syrup, although probably for more psychological reasons!

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The next day, my grandmother, sister and I all piled together to visit the Wilson Candy Store in Jeannette, Pennsylvania. Located outside of Pittsburgh, this store includes a small factory in the basement level, complete with lots of machinery for keeping chocolate at the proper temperature for candy-making and, excitingly, an actual enrober! (A machine I’ve been looking forward to seeing in action ever since I read “Candyfreak” for the first time.)

The smell of chocolate, fondant, sugar, and maraschino cherries was heavy in the air and we were surrounded by whirring machines, chocolate dripping, drizzling, and gushing from various tubes and apparatuses, and a few lucky individuals monitoring machines and making pieces of candy by hand. It was like being in a little Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, only not having to worry about drowning in a chocolate river or turning into a giant blueberry.

Doug Wilson (he inherited the store from his father) walked us through the process of creating both machine-made and handmade candy. I tried dipping cherries into fondant, and we all got free samples if we so much as looked wistfully at a piece of delicious smelling candy. For this reason alone, I can’t recommend enough arranging a visit to local candy factories.

On Monday, when we visited, the “candy of the day” was chocolate covered cherries. These are handmade, but graham crackers and pretzels were also being run through the enrober only to emerge drenched and drizzled with chocolate a few seconds later. The process for making chocolate candy requires a lot of precision in temperature as the chocolate solidifies, because otherwise the cacao butter will separate from the other ingredients and form white, crumbly chocolate (this can also happen when it melts and then resolidifies.) The Wilson Candy Co controls this through a series of water cooled conveyor belts and air conditioning units to keep each stage of the cooling process at the correct temperature.

After the factory visit, Doug brought us upstairs and let us choose a selection of sample candy! I picked a box of Turtles (chocolate covered caramel and pecans) to bring home to my parents; Alexis and I largely were able to restrain ourselves from eating them until we made it to New Orleans, where they were quickly polished off. They were, as expected, excellent - because the candies are made on a relatively small scale, care is taken in the selection of raw ingredients and a lot of pride is placed in the craftsmanship. We were told that they get the cream from a local dairy a few miles down the road - a sharp contrast to some of the bigger candy producers where the cheapest ingredients are used, despite the resulting drop in quality.

Needless to say, the visit to the factory was a lot of fun - I think my Grandma liked it most of all though! Being able to get a behind the scenes look at how candy is made, with explanations in English, will only be extremely helpful as I continue my trip in Mexico tomorrow. And, of course, the free samples really sealed the deal. While I suppose it can be argued I can’t do impartial reviews of free samples, I think that’s a risk I’m willing to take.

Like many independent candy producers, Everett Sechler and Doug Wilson’s stores are family owned and run, so it was fitting that I was able to visit them with my family members. As I make my way into the crazy world all by myself, it will be important that I keep in touch with friends and family back home to serve as both an anchor and eventually, as I return, for them to arrange even more candy factory visits for me.