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 ↓
To Colour Sugar
Ingredients
Directions
Grind the loaf sugar well and sift it through a hair sieve and then a fine wire sieve to obtain rough sugar.
Divide the sugar into parts for each color and place each part in a sheet of paper.
Heat a round-bottomed pan on a warm stove, add the sugar, and stir with a dry whisk until warm.
Add the color to the warm sugar and stir well until evenly colored.
Continue stirring until the sugar is nearly dry, then spread it on the sheet of paper.
Repeat the process for each color, starting with yellow, then green, red, and orange, washing the whisk and pan between colors.
Once the sugar is cold, sift it to remove any clumps and bottle it separately.
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.
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Sugar + orangetop 20% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked 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
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