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Dessert

Caramel Orange Quarters

A confection of orange quarters coated in caramelized sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and orange 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 ↓

Caramel Orange Quarters

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the oranges

  1. Peel the oranges.

  2. Separate the peeled oranges into quarters without tearing the skins.

  3. Place the orange quarters on a wire tray to dry for about 1 hour.

  4. Insert a 6-inch wooden stick into the broad part of each orange quarter.

Coat and set

  1. Boil the sugar until it reaches the crack stage.

  2. Dip the orange pieces into the hot sugar.

  3. Allow excess sugar to drain off.

  4. Place the dipped oranges on oiled wire trays.

  5. Let them cool until the sugar hardens.

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 + orangetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

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

Sugar and orange 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

Sugar
Forms a crisp, glassy candy coating that hardens as it cools around the orange.
Oranges
Provide the fruit base that is coated with the hot sugar.

The step that matters

Boil the sugar until it reaches the crack stage. Sugar syrup must reach the crack stage so that, once cooled, the coating sets hard and brittle rather than sticky or soft. Too little cooking leaves the coating tacky.

“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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