How to Make Homemade Gummies (and Fix Sticky, Soft or Sweaty Ones)
By ONGROK TeamUpdated 8 min read
In this guide
If you only read one line of this page, make it this one: 1 cup of juice to 3 tablespoons of unflavoured gelatin, plus a spoonful of honey if your juice is on the tart side. Soak, warm slowly, fill, fridge. Done in an afternoon, and most of that is the fridge doing its thing.
Honestly, that's all a homemade gummy is. The old version of this page somehow skipped the recipe altogether and went straight to a list of mistakes, which is a bit like teaching someone to drive by describing car crashes before they've found the steering wheel. So we rebuilt it. The recipe sits up top now. After that comes the stuff that tends to go sideways in a normal home kitchen, like gummies that weep all over the inside of the container, or little bears with about as much bounce as a pencil eraser.
What you need
Start with 100% fruit juice. Apple, grape, cherry and cranberry are all well behaved. Pineapple and kiwi are not, and we'll get to why further down because it's a whole thing. Then you need unflavoured gelatin, which Canadian grocery stores sell in boxes of 7 g envelopes. Each envelope holds roughly 2 1/4 teaspoons, a number nobody remembers until they're halfway through doubling a recipe with sticky fingers. Honey or maple syrup? Optional. The squeeze of lemon is optional too, though we'd add it anyway, since it wakes the flavour up a fair bit.
Here's where we put in a word for our own gear, seeing as we make two molds. The Silicone Gummy Molds with Droppers are the fun ones, with stars, hearts, dolphins, octopuses and so on. The Large Scored Gummy Molds are the sensible pair: two trays of 40 square cavities each. Every square has a cross groove cast right into it, so a finished gummy snaps cleanly into four even quarters and you aren't sawing at it with a butter knife. Both sets come with droppers. Beyond that it's a small pot and a whisk, and you're done shopping.
Basic homemade gummies
Makes: about 250 ml of mix, which fills a different number of gummies depending on your cavities. Hands-on time: 15 to 20 minutes. Set time: 1 to 2 hours in the fridge.
Ingredients
- 1 cup (250 ml) fruit juice
- 3 tablespoons (about 4 envelopes, 28 g) unflavoured gelatin
- 1 to 2 tablespoons honey or maple syrup (optional)
- 1 teaspoon lemon juice (optional)
Steps
- Bloom the gelatin. The juice goes into a cold pot first. Sprinkle the gelatin over the top and leave it completely alone for 5 minutes while it turns thick and a bit spongy, which is exactly what you're after.
- Warm it gently. Low heat, lots of stirring, and in 3 to 5 minutes the grains on your spoon should be gone. Honey and lemon go in now. Hot is good; bubbling is not. Somewhere around 60 to 70°C (140 to 160°F) is the sweet spot, since a rolling boil knocks the setting power out of gelatin.
- Skim the foam with a spoon once the pot's off the burner. Every bit you leave turns into a cloudy little bubble inside a gummy.
- Fill the mold. Before anything else, set it on a baking sheet. Otherwise a floppy silicone tray full of warm liquid will fold in half somewhere between the stove and the fridge. Then dropper the mix into each cavity. It starts thickening within a few minutes, so this isn't the moment to wander off and answer a text.
- Chill for 1 to 2 hours. Impatient? 15 to 20 minutes in the freezer does the job.
- Push them out from underneath, one cavity at a time, like popping bubble wrap in slow motion.
Why make such a fuss about step one? The editors at Cook's Illustrated explain that during blooming the cool water "penetrates slowly through each granule of gelatin", and skipping it is how you get clumps. We'd add that clumps never fully melt back out. You just end up chewing them later.
How firm do you want them?
Gelatin is basically your chew dial, and these are the three settings we'd start from, all per cup (250 ml) of juice:
| Texture | Gelatin per cup of juice |
|---|---|
| Soft, like Jell-O jigglers | 2 tablespoons (3 envelopes) |
| Chewy, like a classic gummy | 3 tablespoons (4 envelopes) |
| Firm and bouncy | 4 tablespoons (5 to 6 envelopes) |
There's one more trick, and hardly any recipe bothers with it. Store-bought gummies are dense and chewy mostly because they've lost water; factories dry them after molding. At home, a rack or a dinner plate does the same job if you leave the finished gummies out, uncovered, for 12 to 24 hours before boxing them up. Some of the water evaporates and the outside firms up. As a bonus, they also stop welding themselves to each other.
Gummy bears with Jell-O
Kids' party coming up and zero interest in flavour experiments? The box solves colour and taste in one go. You'll need an 85 g box of flavoured Jell-O, about 2 tablespoons (3 envelopes, 21 g) of unflavoured gelatin and 1/2 cup (125 ml) of cold water. The two powders get whisked together in a cold pot, the water goes in, and the whole thing sits for 5 minutes. From there you already know the drill (low heat, skim, fill), except these only need 20 to 30 minutes in the fridge. Expect these to come out firmer than the juice version. There's less liquid for the same amount of gelatin to set, so it makes sense when you think about it.
Sour gummies
Sour is easy, mostly. Somewhere between 1/4 and 1/2 teaspoon of citric acid gets stirred into the warm mix right before filling, and not a second earlier, because acid eats into gelatin's strength. Our habit would be to throw an extra 1/2 tablespoon of gelatin into the pot as insurance.
The sour sugar coating is where most people get burned. Both sugar and citric acid are thirsty; they pull water out of anything they touch. Coat a batch the day you make it, tip it into a jar, and the next morning you'll find something closer to syrup with gummies floating in it. Better to dry the gummies for a day first and coat them shortly before anyone actually eats them.
Vegan gummies with agar
Gelatin is an animal product, which rules it out for a lot of people. Agar, made from seaweed, is the usual stand-in, at 1 1/2 teaspoons of agar powder per cup (250 ml) of juice with whatever sweetener you like. It's contrary stuff. Where gelatin hates a boil, agar won't set without one, so once it's whisked into the cold juice you bring the pot up to a boil and let it bubble away for a minute or two, stirring. Then move fast with the mold. Agar starts setting the moment it cools, even on the counter. Don't go in expecting a classic chew, though. Agar gummies are firmer, and they snap more than they stretch.
Juices that won't set
Fresh pineapple, kiwi, papaya, mango, figs and ginger will ruin a batch, and leaving it in the fridge longer won't rescue it. The Naked Scientists, a science outreach team from the University of Cambridge, put it nicely: the enzymes in pineapple and kiwi chop gelatin into pieces "far too short to tangle". No tangle, no set. Bottled or canned juice gets around the problem, because pasteurizing it already did the enzymes in. And if your heart's set on fresh, a minute at a boil (then cooling it down before the gelatin goes in) works too.
Common mistakes, and how to fix them
| Problem | Likely cause | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Grainy or lumpy | Gelatin wasn't bloomed, or it went into hot liquid | Sprinkle it over cold liquid and wait 5 minutes |
| Won't set | Too little gelatin, it boiled, or an enzyme fruit | 3 tbsp per cup, keep it under a simmer, use pasteurized juice |
| Rubbery | Too much gelatin | Drop to 2 to 2 1/2 tbsp per cup |
| Sticky | Wet surface | Air-dry 12 to 24 hours before storing |
| Wet or "sweating" | Fridge-cold gummies meeting warm air, or a sugar coat pulling water out | Dry them first, store airtight, coat just before serving |
| Cloudy, bubbly | Foam, or too much whisking | Stir gently and skim before filling |
| Sets in the pot | Cooled down while you were filling | A few seconds back on low heat |
| Tears in the mold | Not fully set, or a thin shape | Wait longer, or freeze 10 minutes before unmolding |
How to store homemade gummies
Fridge life is up to about 2 weeks in something airtight. The freezer buys you roughly 3 months, though they come back a little softer, and it's worth thawing them in the fridge rather than on the counter. A few hours at room temperature is fine, longer if you dried them, but gelatin softens as it warms up, so the glovebox in July is a hard no. Oh, and slip a sheet of parchment between the layers, or the whole batch fuses into one large, slightly sad gummy brick.
Looking after silicone molds
Silicone usually doesn't need greasing. If a skinny shape keeps tearing on you (a starfish arm, say), wipe the thinnest possible film of neutral oil onto the mold and then wipe most of it straight back off. Dried gelatin is a pain to scrub, so let the mold soak in warm water for a few minutes before you go at it with the sponge. Both of our molds are dishwasher safe, and the Large Scored ones are rated from -40°C to 230°C, which means the same tray can go from the freezer to the oven. Just make sure it's bone dry before the next batch. Even one drop of water left sitting in a cavity turns into a soft spot.
Want to make infused gummies?
That's a different recipe, really. An infused oil or butter won't mix into a juice-based gummy; it separates and floats on top, like salad dressing that's been left on the counter. Infused gummies usually start from coconut oil, with lecithin to hold the fat in, and we cover all of that properly in our guide to making infused gummies.
Common questions
How long do homemade gummies last? A couple of weeks in the fridge, sealed. Months in the freezer.
How do I stop homemade gummies sticking together? Dry them first. Give them a day uncovered, then put them in a sealed container with parchment between the layers. Still a bit tacky after all that? A little cornstarch usually sorts it out.
What do you coat homemade gummies with? Cornstarch if it's purely an anti-stick job. Sugar, plain or sour, for that bulk-bin candy look, just not until you're about to put the bowl out.
Can I use collagen powder instead of gelatin? Nope. The collagen you stir into your morning coffee has been broken down on purpose so it won't gel.
Do homemade gummies melt at room temperature? Not really. They go soft and tacky in a warm room, and properly gooey if you leave the bag on the dashboard.
