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Grilled Almonds

A sugar syrup-coated almond dish cooked until the almonds turn a faint yellow-brown.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Almond and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 15,679 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Grilled Almonds

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Blanch the almonds and dry them thoroughly.

  2. In a saucepan, boil the sugar and water until it reaches a thread stage.

Cook and coat

  1. Add the almonds to the syrup and stir occasionally as they fry.

  2. Watch for the almonds to turn a faint yellow-brown; do not wait too long after this change.

  3. Remove from heat and stir until the syrup turns back to sugar and clings irregularly to the nuts.

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 + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,679 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

Almonds
Form the crunchy nut base that the sugar syrup fries and coats.
Sugar
Forms the syrup that browns and then recrystallizes into a sweet, irregular coating.

The step that matters

Watching the almonds turn faint yellow-brown. Once the syrup starts to brown, sugar caramelizes quickly and keeps darkening even off the heat. Waiting too long can turn it bitter, so remove the pan promptly and stir until the sugar recrystallizes.

“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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