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Dessert

Brazil Nut Bar

A candy bar made with Brazil nuts and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Brazil nut and almond share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 68 recipes. Both carry 2-nonanone, which smells fruity, floral. The science ↓

Brazil Nut Bar

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Cook sugar to hard crack stage.

  2. Grease a pan and pour half of the candy into it.

  3. Trim the brown skin off the Brazil nuts and scatter them over the candy.

  4. Add the remaining candy on top.

  5. Allow to cool, then cut into bars about 1 inch thick.

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. Brazil nut + almondtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together68 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  2. Sugar + almondtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,679 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  3. Brazil nut + sugartop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

Brazil nuts
Provide the main body and crunch of the bar.
Sugar
Cooked to hard crack stage, it sets into a brittle candy that holds the nuts together.

The step that matters

Cooking the sugar to hard crack stage. Sugar cooked to the hard crack stage has little water left, so it cools into a firm, brittle candy. If it is cooked less, the bars stay soft and sticky; if cooked too far, it can scorch and taste bitter.

Swap the brazil nut

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

  1. Pistachiofits better
  2. Cashew nutfits about as well
  3. Brazil nutthe original
  4. Hazelnutfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, almond. 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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