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Dessert

Orange Straws

Candied orange peel strips made by soaking, boiling, and simmering with sugar syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,212 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Orange Straws

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the peel

  1. Soak orange peel in a weak brine for 3 to 4 days, changing the water daily.

  2. Scrape off as much of the inner white skin as possible.

  3. Cut the peel into narrow strips.

Blanch the strips

  1. Place the strips in a pot with enough water to cover.

  2. Boil for 10 to 15 minutes.

  3. Drain the strips.

  4. Boil again for 10 to 15 minutes.

  5. Drain the strips again.

Candy and finish

  1. Return the strips to the pot with ½ cup sugar and ⅓ cup water.

  2. Cook slowly until the syrup is nearly absorbed by the orange peel.

  3. Remove the strips with a silver fork.

  4. Place them on waxed paper sprinkled with sugar.

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. Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Orange and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 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

Orange peel
Provides the bitter, aromatic base that the syrup coats and flavours.
Sugar
Sweetens the peel and, as syrup, is absorbed to form a candied coating.
Water
Dissolves the sugar into a syrup that the peel absorbs as it cooks.

The step that matters

Cook slowly until the syrup is nearly absorbed. Gentle heat lets the sugar syrup penetrate the peel gradually. Cooking too hard can scorch the sugar or leave the strips coated in syrup rather than candied through.

“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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