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 ↓
Maple Cream for Counter
Ingredients
Directions
Make the syrup
Combine maple sugar, cream of tartar, and water in a pot.
Cook the mixture until it reaches a soft ball stage.
Cream and set
Set aside until it is almost cold.
Use a spatula to cream it in a basin until it looks cloudy.
Quickly pour it into a deep pan.
Once cold, remove it from the pan and cut into bars or large squares.
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
- Maple sugar
- Provides the sweet flavour and forms the body of the candy.
- Cream of tartar
- Acid that helps prevent large sugar crystals, keeping the texture smooth.
The step that matters
Creaming the cooled syrup. Stirring the syrup while it is cooling encourages fine sugar crystals to form. If it is stirred too early or too hot, or left too long, it can set hard or grainy instead of creamy.
“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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