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Dessert

Caramel Powder

A powdered confection made by caramelizing sugar with almonds and cooling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Almond and butter 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 ↓

Caramel Powder

Ingredients

Directions

Make the caramel

  1. Melt the sugar in a steel pan over medium heat.

  2. Blanch the almonds and add them to the melted sugar.

  3. Continue cooking until the mixture turns a brown to cream color.

Set and powder

  1. Pour the mixture onto a greased marble surface or platter.

  2. Once cooled, pound the mixture into a fine powder.

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. Almond + buttertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,245 recipes

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

  2. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Sugar + almondtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,679 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Provides sweetness and, as it caramelises, the brown colour and toasty flavour.
Almonds
Add crunch and a nutty flavour that stands out against the sweet caramel.

The step that matters

Continue cooking until the mixture turns a brown to cream color. Sugar darkens quickly near the end of caramelisation. Going past the target colour makes the sugar bitter and can burn it, while stopping too early leaves it sweet and pale and less likely to set into a brittle that powders well.

“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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