Freeze-drying candy, like these holiday pops, removes moisture and adds a crunchy texture.
WINDHAM, N.H. -- The candy man can -- freeze-dry his and many of your favorite treats.
Spoiler alert. When and if you try them, expect a surprise. The kind where your eyebrows lift and eyes widen. An involuntarily thing.
The upcoming holiday season, with Thanksgiving and Christmas approaching swifter by the day, brings a whole lot of freeze-drying for Windham candy man Thomas Murray and his year-old Frozen in NH home business.
It also brings plenty of opportunities for prospective patrons to sample the condensed confections.
Murray, 53, was a dedicated candy kid, swift to unwrap and soon to chew traditional favorites or new-flung flavors.
At 8, Tommy Boy -- that is what his mom, Beverly Maxwell, still calls him -- walked to the store in Methuen and bought chocolate turtles for her.
She remembers it well.
Murray does, too. They were Russell Stover turtles, a favorite, he said.
Murray affirms his affection for candy.
"I have eaten candy my entire life," he said. "I was always eating candy. I am the guy you see (with candy). I always have movie theater boxes of candy, wherever I go."
Both the kid and man in Murray are key to his freeze-dried adventure.
But, remember, it takes a candy family to make a candy wagon roll. At least this Frozen in NH wagon.
Murray; his wife, Trisha Scott; and his mom wheel into Old Home Days and holiday fairs together, bearing samples of their candy and selling tubs of the treats.
Pop one in your mouth. You, the uninitiated among you, will be surprised. We were, and we were surprised more than once.
Let's see. There were the candy canes, the taffy, the chocolate ... The list goes on.
As a rule -- and the freeze-dried candy business in New Hampshire comes with rules -- the crunchiness is light, somewhere between cotton candy and Cheetos.
The crunch, like the flavor, depends on the candy.
Taffy, a big seller, undergoes the most dramatic change when freeze-dried. Instead of being overly chewy, it crunches lightly.
Taffy tops the list of favorite freeze-dried treats for both Maxwell and Murray.
The freeze-dried candy typically sells for $6 to $8 for a sealed plastic container. They sell sugar-free candy, for about $9, since it is more expensive to make.
Candy land
The kid in Murray is apparent when he talks about candy. Flashes of light appear in his eyes. A consuming crunch. A stupendous experience.
He is talking candy now, on the ground floor of his Rock Pond Road home in Windham, accompanied by Scott and Maxwell.
A lift enters his step at the Thomas Murray candy factory, a small-batch cottage industry that serves folks locally.
He started experimenting with freeze-drying to satisfy his own candy tastes three years ago.
He had seen a demonstration, a freeze-dried candy-making video on the social media site TikTok. He gave it a whirl.
He bought a freeze-drying machine. With accessories and an oil-free pump, it cost about $5,000. Two years of trial and error and a year in business led him here.
Shelves of candies await freeze-drying. Here also are shelves with finished products, sealed 16-ounce containers of freeze-dried candy.
Also, small ornamental buckets with holiday themes await filling, stuffed with an assortment of freeze-dried candies, a holiday sampler.
Murray peers into his freeze dryer, where frozen candy canes plump and shed moisture as they warm in a vacuum.
The kid in Murray gleefully describes the different flavors and textures that emerge from the wide selection of treats he makes from well-known candies such as M&Ms, Charleston Chews, Mary Janes, Nerds and gummy bears.
The list goes on. To stay in bounds with trademark regulations, he must not sell a candy by its trademark name, but he can say that the particular candy went into making his product.
For instance, his Red Heats are a freeze-dried candy made with Red Hots.
The adult in Murray factors the correct temperature and time to freeze-dry a particular kind of candy.
The creative energy of a child leads Murray to imagine an extensive lineup of freeze-dried holiday treats.
Marshmallow candy corn and pumpkins, candy Christmas trees and Santas, caramel apple pops and the candy canes.
Sometimes a new candy arises from a combination of candies. One concoction came out looking like a coronavirus and, voila, the COVID bomb was born.
A matter of taste
The adult in Murray adheres to New Hampshire rules for his home business.
Murray, in keeping with the state's cottage business regulations, must make all his sales face-to-face. People can reach out to him through his website, but any sale must be made in person. Mail or express delivery service is reserved for the larger operations, he said.
He and his wife and his mom take the freeze-dried candy on the road to Christmas and crafts fairs and various festivals.
Maxwell is right in front of the Frozen in NH station.
She's too polite for a carnival barker but every bit as effective at encouraging passersby to try the samples that she and Scott have placed in mini plastic bags.
Encouraging might be too mild a description. Persistent persuasiveness fits better.
"We were at our last Old Home Day, and a guy came by and I kept saying, 'Try this, you don't have to buy it, just try it,' and he said, 'You are like a pusher,'" Maxwell recalled.
He was a middle-aged, clean-cut man with his wife. He did try it. It was a taffy. Watermelon flavored. He liked it.
"She is very good at drawing people in," Scott said.
We asked Maxwell to demonstrate her sales pitch, as if she were inviting a fairgoer to step up to the table.
"I say, 'Hi,'" she said.
The pitch in her voice rises conspicuously on the vowel, "i."
"Come on in. Have you ever tried freeze-dried candy? and they are like, 'Not really,' and I am like, 'You really have to try it.'"
"We sell a lot through samples," Scott said.
That does not come as a surprise.