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Dessert

Whole Walnut Caramels

Whole walnut caramels are sweet confections made by boiling sugar and water, coating walnuts, and allowing the mixture to harden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and walnut are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,147 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Whole Walnut Caramels

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Combine sugar and water in a saucepan over low heat, stirring until dissolved. Remove any scum that forms.

  2. Brush the inside of the pan with cold water, cover, and let it boil until steam escapes fiercely and the syrup is clear.

  3. Repeat brushing and boiling until the syrup is clear and snaps when dropped into cold water.

  4. Add glucose or a few drops of lemon juice to the boiling syrup, pouring it into the center.

Coat and dry

  1. Once the syrup is slightly colored, keep it warm over low heat while coating the walnuts.

  2. Dip each walnut into the syrup and place it on an oiled sheet to dry.

  3. If the syrup hardens before finishing, reboil it with a little water until it reaches the desired color.

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 + walnuttop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,147 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Granulated sugar
Forms the caramel syrup that sets into a brittle, glossy coating.
Glucose
Interferes with sugar crystallisation, keeping the syrup smooth and less likely to grain.
Walnuts
Provide the nut filling and crunch that the syrup coating surrounds.

The step that matters

Boiling until the syrup is clear and snaps in cold water. Sugar syrup can crystallise if stirred or left to cool unevenly, and it must reach the right concentration to set firm. Brushing the pan walls with water dissolves stray crystals, and testing in cold water shows when the syrup has reached the hard-crack stage needed for a snappy caramel.

“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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