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To Clarify Sugar

A method for clarifying sugar by boiling sugar with water and egg white, then removing scum.

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

  1. Break the sugar into large lumps.

  2. In a pot, combine sugar and water.

  3. Add the egg white and whisk well.

Cook and clarify

  1. Heat the mixture until it boils.

  2. When it starts to overflow, check it with a little cold water.

  3. Once it rises again, remove it from the heat and let it sit for 20 minutes.

  4. Gently remove the scum from the top.

  5. Quickly pour the syrup into a vessel, leaving the sediment behind.

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
Provides the sweetness and dissolves into the water to form the syrup.
Egg white
Coagulates when heated, trapping impurities so they rise as scum that can be removed.

The step that matters

Checking the boil with cold water. Adding a little cold water stops the boil briefly and shows when the syrup has reached the right point. Letting it rise, settle and then removing the scum clears the syrup; overheating or stirring it up again would carry sediment back into the clear liquid.

“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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