Why it works: Sugar and almond are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 15,679 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓
Sugared Almonds
Ingredients
Directions
Cook the almonds
Make a syrup by boiling 1 pint of water with 1 pound of sugar.
Stir in the blanched almonds and cook for 10 minutes.
Remove the almonds and let them dry.
Coat and dry
Reduce the syrup by half.
Dip the almonds back into the syrup for 1 minute.
Dry the almonds on an inverted sieve in a warm place.
Store
Store the dried almonds in a tin box.
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.
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Sugar + almondtop 18% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together15,679 recipes
Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Sugar
- Dissolves into a syrup that sets into a crisp, sweet coating on the nuts.
- Blanched jordan almonds
- The nut centre that the sugar syrup cooks and coats.
The step that matters
Reduce the syrup by half. Boiling off water raises the sugar concentration. A more concentrated syrup cools into a hard, crisp shell rather than a sticky, tacky coating.
“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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