Why it works: Apricot and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,630 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓
Iced Apricots
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Drain the liquid from the can of apricots and cut them into small pieces or pass them through a sieve.
In a saucepan, boil the sugar and water for five minutes to make a syrup.
Make and freeze
Strain the syrup, then add the apricots and their liquid.
Cool the mixture and freeze it.
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.
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Apricot + sugartop 18% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together3,630 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Apricots
- Provide the fruit flavor and body of the iced dessert.
- Sugar
- Sweetens the mixture and lowers its freezing point for a softer texture.
- Water
- Dissolves the sugar into a syrup that carries the fruit flavor through the mixture.
The step that matters
Boil the sugar and water into a syrup. Boiling dissolves the sugar fully into the water. Undissolved sugar can make the frozen dessert grainy, and the dissolved sugar lowers the freezing point so it stays softer.
“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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