Skip to main content
Dessert

Of Clarifying Sugar

Clarifies sugar by boiling with water and removing scum.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Sugar and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Of Clarifying Sugar

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. In a medium-sized pan, beat the egg white until frothy.

  2. Add 2½ cups of filtered water and 1 pound of sugar, stirring to combine.

  3. Place the pan over moderate heat until it begins to boil.

Clarify

  1. Once boiling, move the pan to the corner of the stove to allow scum to form.

  2. Add 2 tablespoons of cold water and simmer for 10 minutes, skimming off the scum.

  3. When the scum is light and whitish, the sugar is clarified.

  4. For a whiter syrup, add lemon juice when the first scum appears.

Strain

  1. Strain the mixture through a wet napkin or silk sieve.

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. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  2. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  3. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Egg white
Its proteins coagulate as they heat, trapping impurities so they rise as scum that can be skimmed off.
Granulated sugar
Forms the syrup itself, providing sweetness and body once the impurities are removed.
Lemon juice
Its acidity helps whiten the syrup by preventing colour from developing as it clarifies.

The step that matters

Skimming the scum while simmering. Egg white proteins coagulate as the syrup heats and bind impurities into scum. If scum is left in the syrup or skimmed too late, cloudiness and off flavours remain in the finished syrup.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits about as well
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Datesfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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.

More clarified sugar recipes

Syrup 24 See all 81 →

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes