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Sauce

Clarifying Sugar

A process for clarifying sugar by boiling with egg white and removing scum.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 122,807 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Clarifying Sugar

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. In a copper sugar boiler or enamelled iron pan, pour in 2 pints of water.

  2. Add 1 egg white and beat until frothy.

  3. Mix in 2 pounds of sugar and set the pan on the fire.

Clarify the syrup

  1. When the mixture boils, add a little cold water to slow the boiling.

  2. Repeat adding cold water several times to encourage scum formation.

  3. Skim off the scum until all is removed.

  4. Pass the clear sugar through a straining bag.

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

Egg white
Its proteins coagulate when heated and trap impurities, forming scum that can be skimmed off.
Sugar
Forms the syrup itself, providing sweetness and body once the impurities are removed.

The step that matters

Skimming off the scum. Scum must be removed completely before straining, because leftover impurities cloud the syrup. Adding cold water repeatedly helps the scum form and rise to the surface, where it can be skimmed away.

“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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