Grape Tanghulu

Candied grapes, otherwise known as grape tanghulu, were made widely viral online in the last few years. This delicious Chinese street food makes incredible fruit skewers with crunchy hard candy coating, a true trend.

The best part is that all you need is skewers, sugar, water, and your favorite fruit to chow down on this excellent easy-to-make candied fruit.

We know this recipe works because one of our readers says “My daughter and I had these at 6 flags and gave this recipe a go at home!!!! 10 out of 10!!! So crunchy so yummy!!!!” Let’s get started!

Ingredients

• grapes (or any other fresh fruit)
• white sugar
• Wooden skewer or lollipop sticks – If you can only find long skewers, just cut on each side after adding grapes, leaving enough stick to hold.

• Buy 6 Inch Bamboo Skewers Here on Amazon
• Buy Candy Thermometer to use with Sugar

How to make Candied Grapes

Prep a glass with dry granulated sugar to hold grape skewers. Wash and dry grapes.

Add grapes to skewers and dry grapes once more. Wetness on the grapes will cause the syrup not to stick. NOTE: If you put more than 3-4 grapes on a skewer, you may have to tip your pan to correctly coat all grapes.

Add water and sugar to a saucepan. Heat the saucepan on medium heat and stir syrup until halfway dissolved. Stop stirring and increase heat to medium-high.

Using a candy thermometer, boil until the temperature reaches 300 degrees. This may take up to 20 minutes. Remove melted sugar syrup from the heat, and then dredge grape fruit skewer in when it’s hot and ready.

Finish coating all grapes and then let coating harden for about 10 minutes. Tanghulu should be served immediately.

Sugar gets HOT HOT HOT. Be very cautious when dealing with hot sugar not to let it touch your skin. This is not a recipe for kids until you get to the eating and enjoyment part.

What is the best way to dry candied fruit?

Set up a glass with sugar and drop skewers in the glass to hold upright. This helps prevent the excess syrup from sticking to the counter while the sugar reaches the hard-crack candy stage.

Can this tanghulu recipe be used on any fruits?

You can make this sweet treat with all kinds of fruits. Berries, fresh strawberries, cherries, and green grapes work fantastic in the sugar water mixture.

Wetter fruits, like mandarin oranges, tangerines, or bananas, would need to be tested to see if the sugar mixture would stick. This isn’t something that we have personally done, so I do not want to recommend that quite yet.

Just be sure that no matter the variety of fruits, they can easily be put onto bamboo skewers. Digging fruits out of hot sugar without that is nearly impossible.