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Dessert

Salt Almonds

Roasted almonds coated with butter and coarse sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Almond and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,245 recipes. Both carry 2,3-pentanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Salt Almonds

Oven, in the book's wordsA warm oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a warm oven”. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare the almonds

  1. Blanch the almonds in boiling water.

  2. Melt the butter and let the almonds sit in it for 1 hour.

Salt and bake

  1. In a dish, mix the salt with the almonds until they are lightly coated.

  2. Spread the almonds on a shallow tin and place in a warm oven at 350°F (175°C) to brown delicately.

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Almonds
Provide the main crunchy texture and nutty flavour, which deepens as they brown.
Butter
Coats the almonds so the salt sticks and the nuts brown gently and evenly.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons the surface and gives a sharp contrast to the sweet, toasted nut flavour.

The step that matters

Browning in the oven. Nuts go from golden to bitter quickly because browning reactions speed up as the surface heats. Spreading them in a single layer and checking often keeps the colour even. Nuts keep darkening briefly after leaving the oven from residual heat, so remove them as soon as they reach the desired shade.

“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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