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Dessert

Peanut Brittle

A hard candy made by dissolving sugar, adding peanuts, and cooling into brittle.

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

Make the brittle

  1. Dissolve the sugar in a saucepan without adding water, stirring to prevent burning.

  2. If the sugar threatens to burn, briefly lift the saucepan from the heat.

  3. Once dissolved, quickly add the chopped peanuts and mix rapidly as it hardens fast.

  4. Pour the mixture into two buttered pie tins and spread it into a thin layer.

Cool and break

  1. Allow to cool, then 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. Sugar + peanuttop 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 then hardens into the brittle candy matrix that holds the peanuts.
Chopped peanuts
Add crunch and nutty flavour throughout the hardened candy.

The step that matters

Watching the sugar as it melts. Dry sugar can scorch quickly once it starts to melt and turn amber. Stirring spreads the heat evenly, and briefly lifting the pan off the heat slows browning before it turns bitter.

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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