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Dessert

Orange Straws

A candied orange peel confection made by boiling peel strips in sugar syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,212 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Orange Straws

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the peel

  1. Peel the oranges and place the peel in cold water.

  2. Boil the peel until tender, changing the water after an hour to reduce bitterness.

  3. Drain the peel in a colander and let it cool.

  4. Cut the peel into long, narrow strips using scissors.

Candy and dry

  1. In a pot, make a syrup with 1 pound of sugar and add the orange peel.

  2. Boil the mixture for 25 minutes.

  3. Remove the strips from the syrup with a fork and place them on plates to dry.

  4. Allow the strips to dry for up to two days in a tin oven or near a stove.

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. Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Orange and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Oranges
Peel supplies the flavour and the chewy candied strips.
Sugar
Syrup sweetens the peel and preserves it as it dries.

The step that matters

Changing the water while boiling the peel. Peel carries bitter compounds that dissolve into the water. Replacing the water during boiling draws out more bitterness, so the candy tastes sweeter and cleaner.

“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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