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Dessert

Almond Nuts

A sweet almond confection made by blanching, crushing, mixing with flour and sugar, cooking, kneading, shaping, and baking.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Almond and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,673 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Almond Nuts

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the almonds

  1. Blanch the almonds and remove their skins.

  2. Crush the almonds in a mortar with a little water.

Make the dough

  1. Mix the crushed almonds with 2 ounces of flour and 3 ounces of sifted sugar.

  2. Cook the mixture in a pan over low heat for a short time.

  3. Remove from heat and knead on a surface with 2 ounces of sugar and 2 ounces of flour.

  4. Shape the mixture into small nut forms.

Dry and finish

  1. Dry the shaped nuts in the oven on parchment paper.

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. Almond + flourtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Almond + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,679 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Sweet almonds
Provide the main body and nutty flavour of the paste.
Flour
Adds structure, helping the paste bind and hold its shape.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps give the finished nuts a dry, crisp surface.

The step that matters

Cooking the mixture over low heat. Heating drives off some moisture so the paste becomes firm enough to knead and shape. Cooking too long dries it out and makes it crumbly and hard to form, while too little leaves it sticky.

Swap the almond

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, sugar):

  1. Almondthe original
  2. Chestnutfits about as well
  3. Milletfits less well
  4. Cashew nutfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar. 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.

More almonds recipes

Salted 148Burnt 34Deviled 25Caramelized 19Roasted 17Blanched 10

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