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Dessert

Peanut Brittle

A sweet brittle made by melting sugar with peanuts or walnuts and cooling into hard pieces.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 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

Prepare

  1. Mash or chop the peanuts or walnuts.

Make the brittle

  1. Put the sugar in a pan over medium heat and stir until melted.

  2. Once liquid, quickly stir in the peanuts.

  3. Pour the mixture onto a greased baking sheet and spread it thin with a broad knife dipped in cold water.

  4. Cut into blocks once cooled.

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

Granulated sugar
Melts to form the brittle's hard, glassy candy base.
Peanuts or walnuts
Add crunch and nutty flavour to the set candy.

The step that matters

Stirring the peanuts in quickly once the sugar is liquid. Sugar keeps cooking and darkening once melted, so the nuts should be added promptly and the mixture poured before it sets, while it can still spread thin.

“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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