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Dessert

Salt Almonds

Roasted almonds coated with salt and butter, then cooled and dried.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and almond are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,245 recipes. Both carry 2,3-pentanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Salt Almonds

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the almonds

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan over medium heat.

  2. Add the almonds to the hot butter and stir until they turn light brown.

  3. Remove the almonds and let the excess butter drain off.

Salt and cool

  1. Roll the almonds in coarse sea salt until well coated.

  2. Sift off excess salt and allow the almonds to cool and dry.

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. Butter + almondtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,245 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Fries the almonds and carries flavor, adding richness and helping them brown.
Blanched valencia almonds
Provide the crunchy body that the butter browns and the salt seasons.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons the coating on the outside, giving a salty contrast to the sweet nuts.

The step that matters

Stirring the almonds until light brown. Butter browns quickly once its milk solids toast, so the almonds can go from golden to dark and bitter in moments. Pull them at light brown, since they keep darkening as they cool.

“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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