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Dessert

Caramel Walnuts

A sweet treat of walnuts coated in caramelized sugar syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Walnut and almond match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 993 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Caramel Walnuts

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the walnuts and filling

  1. Break the walnuts and remove the inner husk.

  2. Blanch the almonds, remove the skins, and pound them finely.

  3. Mix the icing sugar with the almond paste and the egg white until barely moistened.

  4. Add more sugar if the mixture is too soft.

  5. Form the mixture into small balls, placing half a walnut on each side, and roll them.

  6. Set the stuffed walnuts aside for about a day to harden.

Make the caramel and coat

  1. Combine the granulated sugar, water, and cream of tartar in a saucepan.

  2. Boil the mixture until thick.

  3. Dip each walnut in the syrup.

  4. Place the coated walnuts on a buttered plate to cool.

  5. Heat the plate slightly to easily remove the walnuts.

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. Walnut + almondtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together993 recipes

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

  2. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  3. Almond + creamtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,130 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

  4. Almond + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,679 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  5. Sugar + eggtop 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

Walnuts
Form the crisp shell and the main body of each sweet piece.
Almonds
Give the filling body and a firm, pliable texture once pounded.
Icing sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps bind it into a workable mixture.
Egg white
Moistens and binds the filling so it holds its shape.
Granulated sugar
Forms the syrup that cooks into the glossy, hard coating.
Cream of tartar
Helps keep the sugar syrup smooth and prevents crystallization.

The step that matters

Boil the syrup until thick. Sugar syrup must reach the right concentration to set hard as it cools. Undercooked syrup stays sticky, while overcooked syrup turns bitter and brittle. Cream of tartar helps prevent grainy crystals forming.

Swap the walnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (almond, sugar, egg, cream):

  1. Pistachiofits better
  2. Hazelnutfits better
  3. Brazil nutfits better
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against almond, sugar, egg, cream. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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