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Dessert

Sugar Peanuts

A confection of sugar-coated peanuts made by cooking sugar to a ball stage, adding peanuts, and cooling the mixture.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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 ↓

Sugar Peanuts

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sugar syrup

  1. Combine 5 pounds of sugar with enough water to dissolve it in a copper kettle.

  2. Cook the mixture until it reaches a good ball stage.

Coat the peanuts

  1. Add 6 pounds of peanuts.

  2. Stir well.

  3. Remove from heat.

  4. Continue stirring until the sugar turns to sand.

  5. Pour the nuts into a coarse sieve to sift off the sugar.

  6. Return the sugar to the pan.

  7. Add a little water.

  8. Cook until it reaches the crack stage.

  9. Add the peanuts.

  10. Stir until coated.

  11. Return to heat.

  12. Stir until the sugar begins to melt on the nuts.

Cool

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

  2. Optionally color the sugar red if desired.

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 syrup that crystallizes into a sandy coating around the nuts and sets as candy.
Peanuts
Provide the nut base that the cooked sugar coats and binds together.

The step that matters

Stirring until the sugar turns to sand. Sugar syrup must be stirred off the heat so it crystallizes into a fine, sandy coating rather than a single hard mass. Stirring too little or too late can leave large crystals or a sticky, uneven coat.

“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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