Skip to main content
Dessert

Orange Sticks

Candied orange peel strips made by boiling, drying, and coating with sugar syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Orange Sticks

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the peel

  1. Wipe the orange and remove the peel in quarters.

  2. Cut the peel into narrow strips.

  3. Place the peels in a saucepan and cover with cold water.

  4. Bring the peels to a boil and drain.

  5. Repeat this process five times to remove bitterness.

Candy the peel

  1. Heat the sugar with hot water until dissolved.

  2. Add the orange peel.

  3. Cook slowly until the syrup is nearly evaporated.

  4. Drain the strips.

  5. Roll them in granulated sugar.

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
Sweetens the peel and, as syrup, soaks into it to make it candied and glossy.
Orange peel
Provides the main flavour and aroma, with its bitterness reduced by repeated boiling.

The step that matters

Repeat the boil-and-drain process. Boiling and draining several times pulls out bitter compounds from the pith. Skipping rounds leaves the peel bitter, and the sugar syrup cannot hide that taste.

“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.

You might also like

Orange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesOrange Cream Rice PuddingOrange Cream Rice Pudding121 recipesOrange GelatinOrange Gelatin100 recipesOrange SherbetOrange Sherbet73 recipes