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Dessert

Salt Nuts

Salted nuts are nuts roasted with butter and fine salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Nuts and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,291 recipes. Both carry 2,3-pentanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Salt Nuts

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a moderate oven”. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare

  1. Shell and blanch the nuts by pouring boiling water over them.

  2. Spread the nuts on shallow tin plates, covering the bottom of each plate.

Roast and season

  1. Add 1 teaspoon of butter to each plate.

  2. Place in a 350°F (175°C) oven until golden brown, stirring occasionally.

  3. Remove from the oven, sprinkle with fine salt, and let cool.

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. Nuts + buttertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,291 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

Nuts
Provide the main body of the snack and brown during roasting to develop their flavour.
Butter
Adds fat that carries flavour and helps the nuts take on a richer, golden colour in the oven.

The step that matters

Roasting until golden brown. Nuts go from golden to bitter-tasting within minutes once they darken too far. Stirring occasionally helps them colour evenly, so the roast is stopped at the right point.

“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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