Why it works: Crab and sugar work together. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 407 recipes. Both carry hexanal, which smells grass, green. The science ↓
Siberian Crab Jelly
Ingredients
Directions
Cook and drain the crabs
Boil the crabs in enough water to cover them for 2 hours.
Place the crabs in a jelly bag and allow them to drain without squeezing.
Make the jelly
For each pint of syrup, add 1 pound of loaf sugar and boil for 30 minutes.
Select the reddest crabs for a beautiful color in the jelly.
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.
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Crab + sugartop 19% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together407 recipes
Shared aroma: hexanal (grass, green).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Crabs
- Provides the main flavor and the color of the finished jelly.
- Loaf sugar
- Sweetens the jelly and, as the syrup boils down, helps it set.
The step that matters
Boiling the syrup with the sugar for 30 minutes. Boiling concentrates the sugar in the liquid. Enough sugar concentration is what allows the jelly to set, so boiling too briefly can leave it runny.
“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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