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Snack

Red Colored Salted Peanuts

A snack of blanched peanuts coated with melted gum arabic, salted, and dried.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Peanut and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,754 recipes. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓

Red Colored Salted Peanuts

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the peanuts

  1. Blanch the peanuts as you would almonds.

  2. Heat the Knut butter in a copper pan until boiling.

  3. Add the wet peanuts to the pan.

  4. Stir until the peanuts turn a nice yellow color.

Drain and coat

  1. Pour the peanuts into a coarse sieve to drain.

  2. Wipe the pan with a paper towel.

  3. Return the peanuts to the pan.

  4. Add enough melted gum arabic to just wet the nuts.

  5. Sprinkle a good handful of fine table salt over the peanuts.

  6. Stir lightly.

Cool and serve

  1. Spread the peanuts out on a slab to cool.

  2. Sift off any excess salt before serving.

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. Peanut + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,754 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

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

What each ingredient does

Jumbo peanuts
The main nut, which is cooked in the butter and forms the body of the snack.
Ko-nut butter
A fat that cooks the peanuts and carries the colour and flavour into the nuts.
Gum arabic
A sticky binder that helps the fine salt adhere to the nuts.

The step that matters

Stir until the peanuts turn a nice yellow color. The colour change signals that the coating has cooked evenly. Stopping too early leaves the nuts pale, while going too long can scorch the fat and taste bitter.

“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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