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Burnt Almonds

Almonds coated in caramelized sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Burnt Almonds

Why it works: Sugar and almond are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 15,679 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Burnt Almonds

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the almonds

  1. Remove the shells but not the skins from the almonds and warm them slightly.

Coat the almonds

  1. Boil the sugar with water until it reaches the ball stage.

  2. Stir in the almonds with a wooden spoon, ensuring they don't stick to the pan.

  3. Coat the almonds thoroughly with sugar, turning them over continuously.

  4. When a crackling sound is heard, remove the pan from the heat and stir until the sugar resembles coarse sand.

  5. Pour the contents onto a wire sieve and cover with paper for 5 minutes.

Build the coating

  1. Pick out the almonds and return the sugar to the saucepan with just enough water to dissolve it.

  2. Repeat the coating process, keeping the almonds separated.

  3. For a thicker coating, repeat this process 3 or 4 times.

Make crinkly almonds

  1. To make them crinkly, boil 2 pounds of sugar to the crack stage and pour the syrup over the almonds in two coats, stirring each time.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. 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

Almonds
Form the core of the sweet, and their skins are kept on for a richer flavour.
Sugar
Forms a crisp, brittle coating that hardens as it cools and turns opaque when stirred.

The step that matters

Stirring the sugar until it turns sandy. Removing the pan from the heat at the crackling sound and stirring lets the sugar cool and recrystallise into a grainy coating; stopping too late can burn the sugar and leave it bitter.

“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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