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Dessert

Peanut Brittle

A sweet brittle made with roasted peanuts and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Peanut and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,754 recipes. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓

Peanut Brittle

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Shell and chop roasted peanuts to 1 pint.

Make the brittle

  1. Stir 2 lbs granulated sugar over medium heat in a pan.

  2. Continue stirring until the sugar lumps and then gradually melts.

  3. When the sugar reaches a pale coffee color and is clear, add the chopped peanuts.

  4. Quickly pour the mixture onto buttered sheets.

  5. Roll it thin as possible.

  6. Once cold, break into pieces.

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. Peanut + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,754 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  2. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Peanut + sugartop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,545 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Granulated sugar
Melts and caramelizes to form the brittle's crisp, glassy, sweet matrix.
Roasted peanuts
Provide the nutty flavor and crunchy texture throughout the brittle.

The step that matters

Stop cooking at a pale coffee color. Sugar darkens quickly once it starts to caramelize. Pulling it off heat at the pale coffee stage, when it is clear, keeps the flavor mild and the brittle from turning bitter or burnt.

Swap the peanut

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Pecansfits better
  3. Filbertfits better
  4. Peanutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter. 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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