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Sauce

Clarification of Sugar

A method for clarifying sugar by boiling it with water and egg whites, then skimming impurities.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 122,807 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Clarification of Sugar

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the egg whites

  1. Beat the egg whites until frothy.

  2. Gradually add water to the egg whites, using 1 quart for each egg white.

Boil and skim

  1. Break the sugar into pieces and add it to the water.

  2. Boil the mixture and skim off any impurities.

  3. Continue adding the remaining water gradually.

  4. When the skim is very white, the sugar is clarified.

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. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg whites
Coagulate when heated and trap impurities so they can be skimmed off the syrup.
Sugar
Dissolves into the water to form the syrup that is being clarified.

The step that matters

Judging when the skim is very white. As the egg white mixture heats, it coagulates and gathers impurities into a skim on the surface. Removing this skim as it forms leaves the syrup clear. Stopping too early leaves cloudiness, so the skim should look very white before the sugar is considered clarified.

“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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