Skip to main content
Dessert

Orange Sticks

Candied orange peel sticks made by boiling orange rinds, cooking them in a sugar syrup, and rolling in sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 Sticks

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rinds

  1. Cut the orange rinds into long, thin strips, leaving as much pulp as possible.

  2. Put the strips in a saucepan and cover with cold water.

  3. Bring to a boil, changing the water three times for oranges (five times for grapefruit).

  4. Drain well after the last boiling.

Candy and finish

  1. In a separate pot, combine 2 cups of sugar and ½ cup of water to make a syrup.

  2. Bring the syrup to a boil, then add the rinds and boil slowly until clear and tender.

  3. Lay the rinds out on a towel to cool, then roll them in granulated 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

Oranges
Provide the rinds that are candied, supplying the flavour and the chewy texture of the sticks.
Granulated sugar
Sweetens the rinds and, as a thick syrup, replaces the water in the peel, making them clear and candied.
Water
Dissolves the sugar into a syrup and, through repeated boiling, draws out bitterness from the rinds.

The step that matters

Changing the water while boiling the rinds. Boiling the rinds in several changes of fresh water draws out bitter compounds from the peel. Skipping changes leaves the candy bitter, and the rinds must be drained well so the syrup is not diluted.

“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.

You might also like

Orange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesOrange Cream Rice PuddingOrange Cream Rice Pudding121 recipesOrange GelatinOrange Gelatin100 recipesOrange SherbetOrange Sherbet73 recipes