Name: Salted Almonds
Ingredients: ½ pound almonds; 1 teaspoon butter; 1 tablespoon fine table salt

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

½ pound almonds
1 teaspoon butter
1 tablespoon fine table salt

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

Shell the almonds.
Pour boiling water over them and let stand for a few moments.
Transfer to cold water and rub off the skin.
Spread the almonds on a pan and let them dry.

Cook and salt

Add butter and stir on the stove until all almonds are coated.
Place in a 400°F (200°C) oven until pale yellow, turning often.
Once yellow, sift with salt and shake well.
When cool, sift off excess salt.

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: Form the crunchy main body of the snack and carry the toasted flavor.
Butter: Adds fat so the salt sticks evenly and the almonds brown lightly and richly.
Fine table salt: Seasons the surface, and fine grains cling to the coated nuts more evenly.

The step that matters

Place in a 400°F (200°C) oven until pale yellow, turning often.. Almonds darken quickly once their sugars and proteins begin to brown, so they can turn bitter or burnt. Turning them often spreads the heat evenly and keeps the colour light and even.

“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.