Skip to main content
Dessert

Puffed Rice Brittle

A sweet brittle made with puffed rice, sugar, corn syrup, water, vinegar, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Rice and corn match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 933 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Puffed Rice Brittle

Ingredients

Directions

Make the brittle

  1. In a saucepan, combine sugar, corn syrup, water, and vinegar.

  2. Cook over medium heat until the mixture reaches a brittle stage.

  3. Test by dropping a spoonful into cold water.

  4. Remove from heat as soon as it becomes brittle.

  5. Quickly stir in the puffed rice until well mixed.

Shape and set

  1. Pour the mixture into a buttered pan.

  2. When partly cool, press down with your hands.

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. Rice + corntop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together933 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  2. Sugar + syruptop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Corn + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,345 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Sugar + vinegartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,806 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Rice + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Forms the crisp, brittle candy structure as it cooks and hardens.
Corn syrup
Keeps the sugar from crystallising, giving a smooth, glassy brittle.
Puffed rice
Provides the light, crunchy body that the candy binds around.
Butter
Greases the pan so the brittle releases cleanly once set.

The step that matters

Remove from heat as soon as it becomes brittle. Sugar keeps darkening and hardening quickly near the end of cooking, so leaving it on the heat too long can scorch it and make it bitter. Pulling it off at the brittle stage keeps the flavour clean and the texture crisp.

“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.

You might also like

Rice CakeRice Cake120 recipesCorn CakeCorn Cake90 recipesCorn Starch CakeCorn Starch Cake89 recipesRice CreamRice Cream43 recipes