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Dessert

Candied Orange Peels

Candied orange peels are preserved orange peels cooked in a sugar syrup until thickened.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,212 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Candied Orange Peels

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the syrup

  1. Drain the preserved orange peels on a coarse sieve until the syrup has completely drained.

  2. In a preserving pan, add enough broken lump sugar to cover the peels.

  3. Add 3/4 pint of water for every 2 pounds of sugar.

  4. Boil until it forms bubbles when blown from a skimmer.

Candy the peels

  1. Add the peels.

  2. Boil until the syrup bubbles again.

  3. Remove from heat.

  4. Briskly rub the back of a wooden spoon against the inside of the pan to thicken the syrup.

  5. Mix the peels well in the thickened syrup.

Finish and store

  1. Use two forks to take them out and place them on wire racks.

  2. Once cool, store them in drawers, canisters, or boxes.

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. Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Orange and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 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

Preserved orange peels
The main ingredient that becomes candied by absorbing the thickened sugar syrup.
Lump sugar
Forms the syrup that coats and sweetens the peels as it thickens.
Water
Dissolves the sugar so it can form a syrup that the peels can absorb.

The step that matters

Thickening the syrup after removing from heat. Sugar syrup thickens as it cools and loses water, so the peels only become coated and candied if the syrup is worked to thicken properly. Rubbing the pan cools and agitates the syrup so sugar crystallizes slightly around the peels.

“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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