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Dessert

Croquant Paste

A sweet almond paste used for tartlets or biscuits.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Almond and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,673 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Croquant Paste

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the almonds

  1. Blanch the almonds.

  2. Dry the almonds.

Make the paste

  1. Pound the almonds with orange flower water and sugar.

  2. Place the mixture in a small pan and stir over heat until it becomes dry.

  3. Transfer the mixture to a baking board.

  4. Add the egg yolks, egg white, butter, and flour.

  5. Knead into a firm paste.

Shape and bake

  1. Use for tartlets or roll out thinly and cut with fancy cutters.

  2. Bake for dessert biscuits.

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 + flourtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Almond + orangetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,125 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

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

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Jordan almonds
Provide the main nutty body of the paste.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the paste brown lightly when baked.
Egg yolks
Add richness and bind the paste into a cohesive dough.
Egg white
Adds structure and helps bind the dough.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and rich flavour.
Flour
Gives the paste structure so it can be kneaded and shaped.

The step that matters

Stir over heat until dry. The mixture must lose enough moisture to become workable without scorching. Too little drying leaves the paste sticky and hard to shape, while overheating can burn the sugar and almonds, giving a bitter taste.

Swap the orange

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (almond, sugar, egg, butter, flour):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against almond, sugar, egg, butter, flour. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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