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Candied Mint Leaves

Candied mint leaves are fresh mint leaves coated in sugar syrup and dusted with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Mint and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 32% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,592 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Candied Mint Leaves

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the leaves

  1. Wipe the mint leaves dry.

Make the syrup

  1. In a saucepan, cook the sugar and water until it reaches the thread stage.

  2. Remove from heat.

Candy the leaves

  1. Place a mint leaf on a fork and dip it in the syrup until covered.

  2. Remove the leaf and sprinkle it thickly with granulated sugar.

  3. Prepare these a day before serving if possible.

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. Mint + sugartop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,592 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Forms the syrup that coats the leaves and, once dried, creates a crisp sugar shell.
Water
Dissolves the sugar so it can be cooked into a syrup of controlled concentration.
Mint leaves
Provide the aroma and flavour that the candy carries.

The step that matters

Cooking the syrup to the thread stage. Sugar syrup must reach the right concentration. Under-cooked syrup stays sticky and will not set into a crisp coating, while over-cooked syrup hardens too much or crystallises, so the temperature and timing need watching.

“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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