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Dictionary:

jawbreaker

  ('brā'kər) pronunciation
n.
  1. A very hard candy.
  2. Slang. A word that is difficult to pronounce.
  3. A machine that crushes rock or ore.
jawbreaking jaw'break'ing adj.
jawbreakingly jaw'break'ing·ly adv.
 
 
How Products are Made: How is a jawbreaker made?

Background

The jawbreaker is a type of hard, round candy that is ideally so difficult to bite down on that it must be sucked. Jawbreakers range from the size of a hazel nut to the size of a golf ball, and come in many flavors and colors. They are popular with children, and often sold in vending machines. Though originally a trade name, the term jawbreaker became so widespread that it is considered a generic name for any brand candy of this type.

History

Both written and pictorial records indicate Egyptians prepared sweets with honey, sweet fruits, spices, and nuts. Sugar was not known in Egypt, and the first written evidence of its appearance dates to A.D. 500 in India. The method of making sugar from the boiled syrup of the sugarcane plant spread from India through the Arab world, and sugar was introduced to Europe sometime around A.D. 1100 It was first thought of as a spice, and even up through the fifteenth century, sugar was so rare that it was used, for the most part, only medicinally, prescribed in minute doses by physicians. By the sixteenth century, widespread sugarcane cultivation and the technology for refining sugar developed sufficiently that sugar was not such a precious commodity. Small manufacturers produced crude candies in Europe at that time. The methods used were all simple, and produced the kinds of candies that could still be made at home today. By the late eighteenth century, entrepreneurs had developed candy-making machinery, and more complex candies were made and on a greater scale.

Candies are distinguished in broad categories by their hardness, and this corresponds to the temperature to which the sugar is heated. Sugar cooked at a low temperature results in chewy candy; medium heating results in a soft candy; and sugar cooked at a high temperature becomes hard candy, where the sugar is fully crystallized. The jawbreaker, being a type of hard candy, is similar to many candies popular in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century. These hard candies were generally sold singly. A storekeeper pulled out the desired number of pieces from a loose bunch in a glass case or jar. By the mid-1800s, there were close to 400 candy factories operating in the United States, turning out penny candy and other types.

The jawbreaker was made famous by the Ferrara Pan Candy Company of Forest Park, Illinois. The origin of the name, however, is obscure. The word jawbreaker first showed up in the English language in 1839, used to mean a "hard-to-pronounce word." Later, it was used as a slang or derogatory term for a dentist. Ferrara Pan was founded by an Italian immigrant to the United States, Salvatore Ferrara, in 1919. Ferrara came to the United States in 1900. Though he was a skilled confectioner, for years he worked various odd jobs, including as dishwasher and as a railroad foreman. Eventually, he saved up enough money to open his own pastry shop in Chicago in 1908. Among his products was a kind of sugar-coated almond known in Italy as confetti. These became so popular that Ferrara started a separate company to make them. In 1919, Ferrara teamed up with his two brothers-in-law, and founded the Ferrara Pan Candy Company. The new corporation focused on making candies in the hot pan and cold pan process. Ferrara Pan produced many well known confections, including Boston Baked Beans and Red Hots, as well as its original Jaw Breakers. These candies became so popular that the earlier meanings of the term jawbreaker disappeared, and it began to be applied to all candies of this type. There are many manufacturers of jawbreakers today, though Ferrara Pan remains the leading maker of hot pan candies in the world.

Raw Materials

The crucial ingredient in the jawbreaker is sugar. All other ingredients form only a tiny percentage of the finished candy. Jawbreakers use natural and artificial flavors and a variety of artificial colors. Manufacturers may also add calcium stearate, a binding agent, and a wax such as carnauba wax, to provide a shiny, polished surface.

The Manufacturing Process

Jawbreakers are made by the hot pan process, and the type of pan used is very important. Candy-making pans are little like pans found in an ordinary kitchen. They are huge spherical copper kettles with a wide mouth. The pans rotate constantly over a gas flame so the sugar inside is kept tumbling. The worker who makes candy in using these pans is known as a panner.

Pouring the sugar

  • A worker puts granulated sugar into the pan while the pan heats over its gas flame. Each grain of sugar in the pan will eventually become a jawbreaker as it crystallizes, and other grains crystallize around it in a spherical pattern. The panner begins this process by filling a beaker with hot liquid sugar. Using a ladle, the panner carefully pours the liquid sugar into the pan along its edges. The liquid sugar adheres to the sugar grains, and the jawbreakers begin to grow. But this is a lengthy process. With the pans continually rotating, the panner keeps adding liquid sugar at intervals over a period of 14-19 days. In total, the panner may add liquid sugar more than 100 times. The panner or another worker inspects the jawbreakers visually, to make sure the candies are growing perfectly round, and not lopsided.

Adding other ingredients

  • Most jawbreakers are colored only in the outer layers. The panner adds the color and flavor ingredients to the pan when the jawbreakers are almost their finished size. The coloring and flavoring are pre-measured into a small bottle or beaker, and the panner pours them in carefully along the edge of the pan. As the pan rotates, all the jawbreakers in the pan receive the coloring and flavoring equally.

Polishing

  • After approximately two weeks, the jawbreakers have reached their desired diameter, and they are removed from the hot pan to a polishing pan. This pan looks essentially the same as the hot pan. A worker pours the jawbreakers into the polisher and sets it to rotate. Food-grade wax is added, and coats each individual candy as the polisher revolves. After polishing, the jawbreakers are finished, and are now ready for packaging.

Measuring

  • The first step of packaging is to measure the jawbreakers into small batches. This is done by a measuring machine. A worker loads the finished jawbreakers onto a tilted ramp. All the different colors can be mixed together at this point, so that the small batches hold an assortment. The jawbreakers roll down and fall into the central chute of the measuring machine. From the chute, the candies fall into trays that are arranged on spiral arms around the central chute. Each tray will only hold a specific weight, for example one pound. As soon as the weight is reached, the tray swings out of the way and the next tray loads. As the top trays fill, the bottom trays dump into the bagging machine.

Bagging

  • Bagging is done automatically on a large machine that holds a wide spool of thin plastic on a revolving drum. The plastic is in a single layer at this point. The bagging machine forms the bags out of this material, fills them, and then seals them. The plastic may be imprinted with the logo of the candy manufacturer and any other necessary information. The machine unwinds a section of plastic from the roll and pulls it across a form that causes the plastic to fold length-wise in two. Heated jaws press along the fold and melt the two sides together, forming the side seam. The folded plastic is then drawn upwards again, and another pair of heated jaws clamp the bottom, forming another seam. Now the machine automatically cuts the top of the bag and holds it open. The pre-measured amount of jawbreakers from the measuring machine drops in, and more heated jaws then clamp the bag shut along the top. The filled and sealed bags then drop onto a conveyor belt. Workers take them off the belt and toss them into packing boxes. At this point the jawbreakers are ready for distribution or storage.

Quality Control

Quality control is generally simple for jawbreakers. They are a relatively pure product, since they are close to 100% sugar. Workers rely on visual inspection to make sure a batch of jawbreakers is forming correctly. Since the process of making these candies takes about two weeks, and the pans are open, workers have many opportunities to observe the jawbreakers and see that they are shaped right. Each day, a worker may remove several jawbreakers from the batch in process and break them open. The crystalline structure inside should look like concentric rings. Workers also do a taste test. Making jawbreakers is a process that requires little technology, and quality control does not demand any elaborate chemical or physical analysis.

Byproducts/Waste

If quality control reveals any defective jawbreakers, they cannot be melted down and reused. Since the sugar is crystallized throughout the product, it would have to be ground down. So there may be a small amount of waste in the process, if a portion of the product has to be thrown out. Otherwise, the manufacturing process creates no byproducts.

Where to Learn More

Books

Broekel, Ray. The Great American Candy Bar Book. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, Inc., 1982.

Mintz, Sydney W. Sweetness and Power. New York: Penguin Books, 1985.

[Article by: Angela Woodward]


 
WordNet: jawbreaker
Note: click on a word meaning below to see its connections and related words.

The noun has 2 meanings:

Meaning #1: a large round hard candy

Meaning #2: a word that is hard to pronounce


 
Wikipedia: Jawbreaker (band)


Jawbreaker
Genre(s) Emo
Punk
Years active 19881996
Label(s) Shredder Records, Tupelo Recording Company, Blackball Records, DGC
Members
Blake Schwarzenbach
Chris Bauermeister
Adam Pfahler

Jawbreaker was a San Francisco punk band with roots in Los Angeles, where members Blake Schwarzenbach and Adam Pfahler attended Crossroads High School together, and New York City, where Schwarzenbach and Pfahler met bass player Chris Bauermeister at New York University in 1988. The band put its DIY ethos into practice by managing themselves, a model that became appropriated by other bands, including Screeching Weasel.

Style

The band's music is characterized by raw vocals, a driving rhythm section, and grinding guitar, a mix used by many punk bands. The music, however, also features a unique combination of complex song structure, melody, instrumental interludes, and obscure sampled recordings. Jawbreaker's lyrics, written largely by Schwarzenbach, are imbued with a literary drunk's melancholy along the lines of early Charles Bukowski and late Anne Sexton. The songs fuse personal longing and love-sickness with animistic fetishization of objects both public (boats and boxcars) and private (books and bottles). Other songs reflect on post-college depression, social criticism, and youthful aspiration, and embody much of the same style.

Unfun

Jawbreaker's first LP was recorded in Venice, California, and released in 1990; it is a combination of slightly poppy punk and grating hardcore. The album has been characterized as a pop-punk album with bite, a description that fails to account for the subtle poetic nature of Jawbreaker's early work. Unlike what is described today as "pop-punk", Unfun had a sad darkness to it and a maturity with literary aspirations. In "Busy", Schwarzenbach sings: "When nothing seems to be quite worth it and sleep becomes your only sure thing/I'm here to help you out of it/Come and see me for a lift".

Bivouac

Jawbreaker went on hiatus from late 1990 to early 1991, while members of the band finished college. Upon reforming, they relocated to San Francisco's Mission District. It was also around this time that they inspired a following at 924 Gilman Street, a Berkeley venue. The band immediately began to write songs for a new album, Bivouac, which was recorded in 1991 in San Francisco. The album was a sprawling epic: slower, gloomier songs, and more complex arrangements. While it had poppier moments: "Chesterfield King" and "You Don't Know What You Got ('Til It's Gone)" (a Joan Jett cover), it also had lush dark songs featuring instrumental breakdowns and an infusion of call-and-response interplay among the instruments. Almost a period piece, the instrumentation and record quality has the watermark of late '80s/early '90s indie music. Largely, this was a very ambitious recording and writing effort for the band and, according to critics, was too early in their career and largely fell short of its ambitions.

24 Hour Revenge Therapy

After touring relentlessly, Schwarzenbach's raspy vocal stylings finally caught up with him, requiring throat surgery. Post-surgery the band recorded 24 Hour Revenge Therapy, which was released in 1994. The bulk of the album was recorded by well known indie producer Steve Albini (though it is officially credited to Albini's cat, Fluss). In the liner notes to the "Etc." compilation, Adam noted that Albini charged the band $1,032 for recording the album. Not only had Blake's singing become slightly less raspy, the songs are shorter and imbued with a more festive elation than on Bivouac. In the midst of the writing/recording process for the album, the band embarked on the "When It Pains, It Roars" tour. Growing criticism from their core fans, especially after they played a few dates with Nirvana, left the band disillusioned. The band reacted with such scathing songs as "Boxcar": You're not punk, and I'm telling everyone/ save your breath, I never was one/ you don't know what I'm all about/ like killing cops and reading Kerouac. This album was largely heralded as their masterpiece and defining moment, a crowning achievement. The songs encapsulated the range of emotions and specific experiences of many of their educated but working poor fanbase.

Dear You

Jawbreaker signed with Geffen Records and worked with producer Rob Cavallo, who had received success producing Green Day's breakthrough album Dookie. Dear You was a stark departure. Blake's singing and the guitar sound were cleaner. The album had been given a "radio-friendly" polish their previous albums lacked. This seemed to be the final straw for many fans, who felt the band had betrayed them. Adam and Blake had talked extensively about the benefits of self-managing their band and how major labels spelled financial death for many bands, particularly in Maximum Rock and Roll's major labels issue. These well-publicized stances made the band's Geffen Records signing shocking to many fans, who felt a certain ownership of a band who had released their albums up until that point on labels based out of bedrooms.

Blake has stated that this album kept the band alive, as they were on the verge of breaking up after 24 Hour Revenge Therapy. Despite a vigorous marketing push by Geffen, album sales were anemic in the wake of a post-Green Day market, and failed to come close to those of their previous albums. However, the album was a critical success, bringing Jawbreaker's artistic maturity to a new audience. In 2004, the members of the group reacquired the rights to Dear You and successfully put the long out-of-print album back into circulation, with additional tracks including a more polished version of "Boxcar", their only music video ("Fireman"), and updated liner notes that include a picture of Kurt Cobain wearing a Jawbreaker t-shirt. Their hit "Bad Scene, Everyone's Fault" was released posthumously on EA Sports video game NCAA Football 06

After Dear You was released in September 1995, the band soldiered on for another year before calling it quits. One of their last tours was opening for the Foo Fighters including a San Francisco show contained on the posthumous release; Live 4/30/96. The LP version of the live album was a mailorder only offer limited to a few hundred copies from Allied Records.

Cult status

The band's cult status as the definitive nineties post-emo band has grown since its breakup. In 2003, a Jawbreaker tribute album, Bad Scene, Everyone's Fault, was released on Dying Wish Records, and featured covers by 18 bands including Fall Out Boy, Nerf Herder, Sparta, and Face to Face. Another tribute album, So Much for Letting Go, was released on Coptercrash Records. Chris Conley of Saves the Day has cited Jawbreaker as an influence on his writing. Jesse Lacey is know to cover Jawbreaker songs such as accident prone is some of his concerts. Author Dave Roche frequently cites Jawbreaker as one of his favorite bands. Bird flu phylogeographer Robert Wallace quotes a Schwarzenbach lyric on his website. A character in the punk rock webcomic Nothing Nice To Say routinely refers to Jawbreaker as one of his favorite bands. This character's name is Blake, and he seems to be modeled after Schwarzenbach. Jawfaker, an East Coast band, formed in 2006 to perform Jawbreaker songs live.

Post-Jawbreaker

Singer Blake Schwarzenbach went on to form the New York City-based band Jets to Brazil, which has since broken up. Between bands, he found work as a freelance writer, even writing a few game reviews for GameSpot. He is now an adjunct English professor at Hunter College in New York City. Drummer Adam Pfahler lives in San Francisco and currently runs Lost Weekend Video and Blackball Records, which primarily keeps the Jawbreaker catalog in print. He has played drums in Bay Area pop punk band J Church and played in Whysall Lane with Richard Baluyut, the lead singer for Versus. Bassist Chris Bauermeister briefly played with Horace Pinker while he was working on a doctorate degree in History at Purdue. He has since moved to the state of Washington and plays bass for a band called Shorebirds with singer/guitarist Matt Cannino from the band Latterman.

Trivia

The voice-over on the song "Condition Oakland" from "24 Hour Revenge Therapy" is from Jack Kerouac's book "Lonesome Traveller," in a passage entitled "The Railroad Earth". It begins with:

"...everything is pouring in, the switching moves of boxcars in that little alley..."

The voice-over on the song "Jet Black" from "Dear You" is spoken by Christopher Walken, from the movie "Annie Hall", and begins with:

"I tell you this because, as an artist, I think you'll understand [...] Sometimes when I'm driving..."

Rise Against's Tim McIlrath covered Tour Song for an "AOL Sessions Under Cover" performance.[1] He has also played the song at every concert in the Summer 2007 The Sufferer & the Witness tour.

Discography

Albums

EPs / 7 inches / splits

Further reading

External links

References



 
Translations: Translations for: Jawbreaker

Dansk (Danish)
n. - kæbeknuser

Nederlands (Dutch)
woord waar men zijn tong over breekt, toverbal

Français (French)
n. - (US) mot très difficile à prononcer

Deutsch (German)
n. - Zungenbrecher

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - γλωσσοδέτης, δυσκολοπρόφερτη λέξη ή όνομα

Italiano (Italian)
scioglilingua, parola difficile da pronunciare

Português (Portuguese)
n. - palavra (f) de difícil pronúncia, bala (f) dura (doce), máquina (f) de britar pedra ou minério (Mec.)

Русский (Russian)
труднопроизносимое слово, твердая карамель

Español (Spanish)
n. - trabalenguas, caramelo de goma, triturador

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - tungvrickande ord

中文(简体) (Chinese (Simplified))
难发音的字

中文(繁體) (Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 難發音的字

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 발음하기 힘든 단어, 딱딱한 사탕, 광석 분쇄기

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 発音しにくいことば, 硬いキャンデー, 発音しにくい言葉

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) كلمه يصعب نطقها‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮שוברת שיניים (מלה), ממתק קשה‬


 
 

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Copyrights:

Dictionary. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2007. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.  Read more
How Products are Made. How Products are Made. Copyright © 2002 by The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
WordNet. WordNet 1.7.1 Copyright © 2001 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Jawbreaker (band)" Read more
Translations. Copyright © 2007, WizCom Technologies Ltd. All rights reserved.  Read more

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