Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓
Rock Candy
Ingredients
Directions
Make the syrup
Combine the sugar, water, and cream of tartar in a large pot.
Cook the mixture until it reaches 40° on a crystal gauge.
Grow the crystals
Pour the syrup into a rock candy pan.
Place the pan in a dry room or warm shop, avoiding any movement.
Allow the syrup to set for 36 hours.
Hold a match over the top of the pan.
Check if the string is the desired size.
Finish
Drain off the syrup.
Let the candy set overnight.
Cut out the strings.
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.
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Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together43,450 recipes
Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Coarse confectioners' sugar
- Dissolves in hot water, then recrystallizes as the syrup cools to form the candy crystals.
- Cream of tartar
- Adds acidity that partly breaks down sucrose, helping keep the syrup smooth and less prone to grainy crystals.
The step that matters
Cook the mixture until it reaches 40° on a crystal gauge. The syrup must be concentrated enough to be supersaturated. If it is not cooked far enough, too little sugar stays dissolved to form large crystals as it cools.
“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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