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To Clarify Sugar

A method to clarify sugar by whisking egg whites with water, heating with sugar, skimming foam, and straining.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 122,807 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

To Clarify Sugar

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Whip the egg whites in a large bowl with the water.

  2. Break the sugar into a sweetmeat pan and add two-thirds of the whipped mixture.

  3. Heat the pan until it begins to rise, then add a little white water.

  4. Remove from heat and skim off the foam.

  5. Continue this process until no more foam rises.

  6. Strain the mixture through a wet linen or flannel bag.

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. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 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

Egg whites
When whipped and heated, they coagulate and trap impurities, lifting them into a foam that can be skimmed away.
Sugar
The main ingredient being purified; it dissolves into the water to form the syrup that is clarified.

The step that matters

Heating until the mixture rises. If the pan boils over or is heated too hard, the foam may not form cleanly and impurities can be stirred back in. Heat gently until the mixture begins to rise, then remove it from the heat so the foam can be skimmed off.

“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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