Name: Salted Almonds
Ingredients: 1 pound almonds; 1 cup coarse sea salt; 2 tablespoons butter

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 ↓

Salted Almonds

Ingredients

1 pound almonds
1 cup coarse sea salt
2 tablespoons butter

Directions

Blanch the almonds in boiling water for 8 minutes.
Drain the almonds.
Sauté the almonds quickly in butter.

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.

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: Provides the crunchy, nutty base; blanching loosens their skins before sautéing.
Butter: Carries heat for quick browning and adds rich flavour to the almonds.

The step that matters

Sauté the almonds quickly in butter. Almonds and butter brown fast. Sugars and milk solids in the butter darken quickly at high heat, so the nuts can scorch before they look done. Keep them moving and pull them off the heat as soon as they turn golden.

“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.