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Dessert

Salt Almonds or Peanuts

Salted almonds or peanuts are nuts roasted with butter and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Nuts and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,291 recipes. Both carry 2,3-pentanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Salt Almonds or Peanuts

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the nuts

  1. Shell the nuts and pour boiling water over them.

  2. Let them stand for five minutes, then remove the skins.

Fry and salt

  1. In a frying pan, melt the butter over high heat.

  2. Add the nut meats and shake until nearly browned.

  3. Sprinkle with salt and serve.

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. Nuts + buttertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,291 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 or peanuts
The main ingredient; browning in the hot butter gives them a toasted, nutty flavor and crisp texture.
Butter
Adds fat that conducts heat evenly and carries flavor, helping the nuts brown in the pan.

The step that matters

Shaking the nuts until nearly browned. Nuts brown through Maillard reactions between sugars and proteins, which speed up at high heat. Constant shaking spreads the heat evenly, so the nuts toast without the outside scorching before the centre is cooked.

“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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