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Almond Comfits

Candied almonds coated with gum arabic and sugar syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Almond Comfits

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the almonds

  1. Clean the almonds.

  2. Blanch the almonds in hot water to remove the peels.

  3. Drop the blanched almonds into cold water.

  4. Remove the almonds from the cold water.

  5. Dry the almonds on a sieve.

  6. Place the almonds in the oven to dry thoroughly.

Make the gum and syrup

  1. Dissolve the gum-arabic in hot water.

  2. Strain the dissolved gum-arabic through a fine sieve.

  3. Boil the clarified sugar in a syrup to the 'Thread' stage, mixing in a little of the dissolved gum for consistency.

  4. Keep the sugar syrup warm on a slow fire without boiling.

Coat the almonds

  1. Clean the comfit pan.

  2. Add the dried almonds to the pan.

  3. Pour 2 tablespoons of gum over the almonds, distributing it evenly.

  4. Dry the almonds thoroughly.

  5. Apply a second charge of gum to the almonds.

  6. Dry the almonds again.

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 main body of the candy, which the sugar coating builds up around.
Clarified loaf sugar
Forms the syrup that builds the crisp, sweet shell over each almond.
Gum-arabic
Binds the sugar to the almonds and helps each coating layer adhere evenly.

The step that matters

Keeping the sugar syrup warm without boiling. If the syrup boils or cools too much, its sugar concentration changes and the coating can crystallise unevenly or fail to build smoothly on the almonds.

“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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