Why it works: Apple and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 16,478 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓
Apple Sauce
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the apples
Pare, quarter, and core the apples.
Cook the apples
In a pot, combine water and sugar to make a syrup.
Simmer the apples in the syrup until tender, being careful not to break them.
Transfer the cooked apples to an earthen dish.
Repeat until all apples are cooked, adding only a few at a time to the syrup.
Allow the syrup to cool.
Pour the cooled syrup over the apples.
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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Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together16,478 recipes
Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
Apple and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 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
- Nice tart apples
- Provide the main fruit, whose tartness balances the sugar in the syrup.
- Sugar
- Sweetens the syrup that the apples simmer in and is poured back over them.
The step that matters
Simmer the apples in the syrup until tender, being careful not to break them. Apples simmered too long or too hard soften past the point of holding their shape and turn to mush. Cooking them gently in small batches keeps the pieces intact while the heat softens the cell walls enough to become tender.
“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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