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To Dry Apricots

A method of drying apricots with sugar and kernels, producing a sweet, preserved fruit.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Apricot and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,630 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

To Dry Apricots

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Pare the apricots and remove the stones.

  2. Blanch the kernels and place them inside the apricots.

Make the syrup

  1. Strew the apricots with 1 pound of sugar and let them sit until the sugar extracts the juice.

  2. Gently boil the apricots and sugar mixture until the fruit is tender.

  3. Carefully remove the fruit and boil the syrup until it is very rich.

  4. Pour the syrup over the fruit and let it sit for three days.

Dry the fruit

  1. Place the fruit on dishes and dry them in the sun under garden glasses, turning them once or twice a day to maintain their shape.

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. Apricot + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,630 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

Apricots
The fruit that is softened, sweetened and dried into the finished product.
Sugar
Draws out juice and, once boiled into syrup, sweetens and preserves the fruit.
Blanched apricot kernels
Add a nutty, almond-like aroma inside each apricot.

The step that matters

Boiling the syrup until very rich. Boiling concentrates the sugar so the syrup thickens and preserves the fruit. Too little boiling leaves it thin and the fruit may spoil during drying.

“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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