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Dessert

Peanut Brittle

A hard candy made from sugar, glucose, peanuts, baking soda, and water.

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

Peanut Brittle

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Combine sugar, glucose (or cream of tartar), and water in a pan.

  2. Boil until it reaches the soft ball stage.

Cook the peanuts

  1. Add the peanuts.

  2. Cook until they are roasted to a light brown.

  3. Remove from heat.

  4. Add baking soda and stir well.

Spread and stretch

  1. Quickly pour out the mixture and spread it as thin as possible.

  2. Once cool enough to handle, turn it over.

  3. Stretch it out thin.

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 + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Cream + peanuttop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together490 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  3. Sugar + peanuttop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,545 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Provides the sweetness and, as it cooks, the hard, crisp body of the brittle.
Glucose
Interferes with sugar crystals forming, keeping the brittle smooth rather than grainy.
Cream of tartar
Acts as an acid that helps prevent sugar crystallization, keeping the syrup smooth.
Raw spanish peanuts
Add crunch and a roasted, nutty flavor as they brown in the syrup.
Baking soda
Reacts with the hot syrup to release gas, lightening the brittle so it is more tender to bite.

The step that matters

Quickly pour out the mixture and spread it as thin as possible. Hot cooked sugar sets fast as it cools, so it must be poured and spread while still fluid. Spreading it thin keeps the brittle brittle and easy to break rather than thick and hard to bite.

Swap the peanut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, cream):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Pistachiofits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Peanutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, cream. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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