Why it works: Almond and syrup work together. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 746 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓
Burnt Almonds
Ingredients
Directions
Make the almonds
Sift the almonds and place them in the syrup.
Stir until the mixture cools.
Pick the almonds apart, breaking any that stick together.
Coat and finish
Prepare another pan of syrup and coat the almonds twice.
Separate the almonds after coating.
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.
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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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Almond + syruptop 21% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together746 recipes
Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Almonds
- Form the crunchy nut core that the sugar coating hardens around.
- Syrup
- Forms a hard, brittle sugar shell around each almond as it cools.
The step that matters
Stir until the mixture cools. Stirring while the caramel-stage syrup cools makes it crystallize into a sugary, separated coating instead of one large hard mass. Stopping too early leaves the almonds stuck together.
“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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