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Dessert

Almond Toffee

A sweet confection made by cooking sugar with water and almonds, then pouring the mixture onto a tin.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Almond Toffee

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Blanch and skin the almonds.

  2. Cut the almonds in half.

  3. Dry the almonds in the oven without browning.

Make the toffee

  1. Dissolve the sugar in the water.

  2. Add the cream of tartar.

  3. Boil until a deep amber syrup forms.

  4. Remove from heat.

  5. Add the almonds.

  6. Bring to a boil again.

  7. Pour onto a buttered or oiled tin.

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

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

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

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

  3. Sugar + almondtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked 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
Forms the brittle toffee base and provides sweetness as the syrup cooks and hardens.
Almonds
Add crunch and nutty flavour that stands up to the hard, glassy toffee.
Cream of tartar
Its acidity helps prevent the sugar from turning grainy or crystallising.

The step that matters

Boil until a deep amber syrup forms. Sugar darkens quickly near the end of cooking. Stopping at the right amber shade gives a brittle, hard toffee with a caramel flavour, while too pale stays soft and too dark turns bitter and burnt.

Swap the almond

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

  1. Almondthe original
  2. Pistachiofits about as well
  3. Chestnutfits about as well
  4. Hazelnutfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, 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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