After a trip to Scandinavia, I got hooked on some of their traditional salty licorices. Looking to satisfy my urge once I got back home, I searched for US-made alternatives and found none. Most domestic licorice was soft, rubbery, lacking real licorice, and, most importantly not the right kind of salty. I was able to find imported varieties on Amazon and at Scandinavian specialty stores. But it made me think, what would it take to make it myself? I ended up going pretty far down the rabbit hole on this one.

I started by looking for recipes for salted licorice. I quickly determined that the American and Scandinavian interpretation of salted licorice was quite different. An American salted licorice uses sodium chloride while a Scandinavian salted licorice uses ammonium chloride to give it it’s well known tang. I was able to find a few Swedish recipes and translated them to English. I then converted the volumes to mass and found substitutes for ingredients not available in the US. One of the hardest ingredients to find was ammonium chloride. The only places I could locate it were on laboratory supply websites. Was it safe to use? The FDA considers ammonium chloride to be an additive for baking and it’s generally recognized as safe. The other key is that anything ordered from a lab supply company must be food grade or better.

Ingredients in hand, I set to work on creating my first batches of licorice. Despite having recipes, I found the directions to be vague and lacking a lot of direction. I ended up having to learn a lot: acceptable ingredient substitutes, stove temperatures and duration, how to cut shapes out of the dough, preventing the shapes from sticking together, and how to calculate the calories in each piece.

Since I started, I’ve made some good Scandinavian salted licorice and some bad stuff. My next goals when I have time to take this further are to perfect the texture and hardness. If I can get that right it would fun to toy with different flavors and to see if there are any lower calorie substitutions I can make.