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Dessert

Salt Almonds

Roasted almonds seasoned with olive oil and coarse 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 olive match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,875 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Salt Almonds

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Shell and blanch the almonds by pouring boiling water over them and letting them sit until the skins slip off easily.

Fry and salt

  1. Heat the olive oil in a frying pan until boiling hot.

  2. Drop in the almonds and stir constantly until they begin to turn light brown.

  3. Remove the almonds with a skimmer and scatter them on a cloth sprinkled with salt.

  4. Roll the almonds until sufficiently salted.

  5. If the almonds are too salty, rub them with a clean cloth.

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 + olivetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Almonds
Provide the main crunchy body and nutty flavour of the snack.
Olive oil
Conducts heat for frying and gives the almonds a rich, fatty coating.

The step that matters

Stirring the almonds in the hot oil. Almonds go from light brown to burnt quickly, and residual heat keeps darkening them after removal. Constant stirring keeps the colour even and the bitterness low.

“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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