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Spiced Candied Walnuts Recipe

This candied walnut recipe was is the perfect solution to a New Years Eve hors d'oeuvres dilemma. Made with walnuts, sea salt, black pepper, cinnamon, cayenne pepper, and powdered sugar.

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Why it works: Walnut and chickpea share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and 26 recipes mention both. Both carry 2,4-nonadienal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

The recipe

Makes 4 cups.Makes about 5 cups.

Ingredients

Contains: milk, wheat, peanut, tree nuts (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

Directions

Step-by-step directions aren't available for this recipe. See the full recipe at the source →

By 101cookbooks. Recipe from Open Recipes.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Walnut + chickpeatop 6% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together26 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  2. Chickpea + beanstop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together229 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Peanut + beanstop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together190 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  4. Peanut + walnuttop 4% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together241 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  5. Cinnamon + chickpeatop 4% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together150 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

Flavor stand-ins for the peanut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, cinnamon, walnut, sugar, chickpea, beans, buttermilk):

  1. Almondbetter flavor fit
  2. Cashew nutabout as good a flavor fit
  3. Pistachioabout as good a flavor fit
  4. Peanutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, cinnamon, walnut, sugar, chickpea, beans, buttermilk. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).