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Dessert

Peanut Brittle

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and peanut are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 27% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,545 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Peanut Brittle

Ingredients

Directions

Make the brittle

  1. In a copper kettle, combine sugar, glucose, and water. Cook until it reaches the soft ball stage.

  2. Add the Spanish peanuts and stir until they are well roasted and fragrant.

  3. Remove from heat and mix in the salt and bicarbonate of soda.

Shape and cool

  1. Pour the mixture onto a greased, warm marble surface and spread it thin.

  2. After a moment, turn the batch over, stretch it thin, and then cut or break it into pieces.

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 + 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
Forms the crisp, brittle candy structure as it cooks to a syrup.
Glucose
Slows sugar crystallisation, keeping the brittle smooth rather than grainy.
Spanish peanuts
Provide the main bulk, crunch and roasted nutty flavour.
Bicarbonate of soda
Reacts with the hot syrup to lighten its texture and make it brittle and airy.

The step that matters

Adding the bicarbonate of soda. Bicarbonate of soda reacts quickly with the hot sugar, releasing gas that aerates the candy. It must be stirred in off the heat and worked in promptly, or the brittle will be dense and the reaction uneven.

“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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