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Caramel Potatoes

Caramelized potatoes cooked in butter and sugar until browned.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and potato are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,456 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Caramel Potatoes

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the potatoes

  1. Melt the butter in a sauté pan.

  2. Add the boiled potatoes and fry until they are colored.

  3. Drain off the butter and sprinkle the potatoes with sugar.

  4. Roll and toss the potatoes until well browned.

Serve

  1. Dish up and serve.

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. Butter + potatotop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,456 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Potato + sugartop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Butter
Fat that fries the potatoes and carries heat evenly across the surface.
Potatoes
Starchy base that browns on the outside while the inside stays tender.
Granulated sugar
Caramelizes on the potato surface, adding sweetness and deep brown color.

The step that matters

Roll and toss until well browned. Sugar caramelizes only when the surface is hot and dry enough to brown. Stopping early leaves the coating pale and sticky rather than caramelized, and the sugar can scorch if the heat is too high for too long.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Sweet potatofits about as well
  2. Leekfits about as well
  3. Potatothe original
  4. Capsicumfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar. 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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