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Dessert

Salt Almonds

Roasted almonds coated in butter and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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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 ↓

Salt Almonds

Ingredients

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 the almonds

  1. Shell the almonds and pour boiling water over them. Let them stand for a few minutes.

  2. Slip the almonds out of their skins.

Butter and bake

  1. Place the almonds in a tin pie plate with the butter.

  2. Heat in the oven at 400°F (200°C) until the butter melts.

  3. Shake the pan until the almonds are coated with butter.

  4. Transfer to a clean pie plate and sprinkle heavily with salt.

  5. Return to the oven and heat until golden brown, watching carefully.

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 + 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 body of the snack and brown to a golden, nutty flavor in the oven.
Butter
Coats the almonds so the salt adheres and the nuts brown evenly.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons the surface and provides the salty contrast to the nutty almonds.

The step that matters

Returning the almonds to the oven for browning. Nuts go from golden to burnt within a short time because sugars and proteins in them brown quickly at high heat. Watching carefully prevents bitter, scorched flavor.

“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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