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Dessert

Salted Almonds

Roasted almonds coated with butter and fine dry salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Almond and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,245 recipes. Both carry 2,3-pentanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Salted Almonds

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the almonds

  1. Shell the almonds.

  2. Blanch them in boiling water for 30 minutes until the skins slip off easily.

  3. Remove the skins.

  4. Let the almonds dry for several hours.

Roast

  1. Melt the butter in a hot dripping pan.

  2. Stir the almonds in the melted butter to coat them.

  3. Roast the almonds in the oven at 400°F (200°C).

  4. Stir the almonds often until they begin to color faintly.

  5. Remove the almonds from the oven.

  6. Shake them in a colander to remove excess grease.

Salt and serve

  1. Spread the almonds on a dish.

  2. Sprinkle the almonds with fine dry salt.

  3. Stir the almonds to ensure each nut is coated.

  4. Serve cold.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Almond + buttertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,245 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Almonds
Form the crunchy body of the snack, browning and taking on flavour as they roast.
Butter
Carries heat and fat to the nuts, helping them brown evenly and gain a rich flavour.

The step that matters

Stirring while roasting. Almonds go from faintly coloured to over-browned quickly. Frequent stirring keeps heat even and stops the thin skins and outer layers from scorching, which would make them bitter.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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