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Burnt Almonds

Burnt almonds are almonds roasted with sugar and water until dry, then colored with cochineal.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Burnt Almonds

Why it works: Almond and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 15,679 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Burnt Almonds

Ingredients

Directions

Candy the almonds

  1. Combine almonds, sugar, and water in a saucepan.

  2. Boil over a clear coal fire until the almonds crack.

  3. Remove from heat and stir until completely dry.

  4. Sift the sugar off using a wire sieve.

Color and dry

  1. Return almonds to the pan with a little water and bring to a boil.

  2. Add cochineal to the sugar for coloring, then add the almonds back to the pan.

  3. Stir over heat until the almonds are completely dry.

Store

  1. Store in a glass container; they will keep for a year.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Almond + sugartop 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

Almonds
Form the crunchy core that the sugar coating is built around.
Loaf sugar
Melts and recrystallizes into a crisp, sweet, opaque coating on the almonds.
Cochineal
Provides the red coloring for the sugar coating.

The step that matters

Stir until completely dry. Sugar left damp stays sticky and can clump or weep. Drying the coating evenly lets the sugar crystallize into a crisp, separate shell.

“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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