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Dessert

Orange Straws, Extra Fine

Candied orange peel strips made by boiling, drying, and crystallizing in sugar syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Orange Straws, Extra Fine

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the peels

  1. Cut orange peels into long, narrow strips.

  2. Soak the strips in cold water with a little coarse sea salt.

  3. Bring the soaked strips to a boil.

  4. Drain the water.

  5. Add fresh water and bring to a boil.

  6. Drain the water.

Candy the peels

  1. Cook the peels in a mixture of 10 lbs. sugar and 1 gal. water over low heat.

  2. Cook until the peels are tender.

  3. Drain the syrup.

Dry and finish

  1. Dry the peels on a wire screen.

  2. Crystallize the dried peels in sugar.

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

Orange peels
Provide the flavourful, aromatic body of the candied strips.
Sugar
Sweetens the peels and, as a syrup, slowly replaces their water to make them candied.

The step that matters

Cook the peels until tender in the sugar syrup over low heat. Low heat lets the syrup penetrate the peel gradually without boiling off too much water or hardening the strips. Cooking too fast can leave the peels tough or cause the sugar to crystallize unevenly.

“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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