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To Clarify Sugar

A process to clarify sugar by boiling with water and egg white, removing scum to produce clear syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and egg 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

Prepare the mixture

  1. Combine the sugar and ½ cup of water in a pot.

  2. Beat the egg white.

  3. Stir the beaten egg white into the mixture until the sugar dissolves.

  4. Bring the mixture to a boil.

  5. Let the scum rise thickly.

Clarify the syrup

  1. Add another ½ cup of cold water for each pound of sugar.

  2. Boil while edging the pan forward to remove all scum.

  3. Set aside to settle.

  4. Skim off the scum with a sugar skimmer.

  5. Place the scum on a reversed hair sieve over a dish to drain clear syrup.

  6. Return the drained syrup to the pan.

  7. Boil the syrup.

  8. Skim again.

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. 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

Sugar
Forms the syrup that the clarifying process purifies and sweetens.
Egg white
Binds impurities into a scum that rises to the surface for removal.

The step that matters

Boil while edging the pan forward to remove all scum. Scum collects in a band at the edge of the boiling liquid. Moving the pan lets the scum be skimmed away, so impurities are not left in the syrup.

“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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