Why it works: Sugar and peanut are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 27% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,545 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓
Peanut Brittle
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Shell the peanuts and remove the brown skin, then grind them finely.
Make the brittle
In a frying pan, heat the sugar over medium heat, stirring constantly until it melts into a syrup.
Add the ground peanuts to the syrup and mix thoroughly.
Pour the mixture onto an unbuttered baking sheet and spread to your desired thickness.
Before it hardens, mark the mixture into squares.
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.
-
Sugar + peanuttop 27% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together2,545 recipes
Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Sugar
- Melts into a syrup that hardens into the brittle's crisp, glassy structure.
- Peanuts
- Provide the nutty flavor and crunchy body of the brittle.
The step that matters
Marking the squares before it hardens. Once the cooked sugar syrup cools and sets, it becomes brittle and hard to cut cleanly, so scoring while it is still pliable keeps the pieces neat.
“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.
You might also like
Peanut Candy82 recipes
White Cake431 recipes
Pound Cake373 recipes
Orange Bundt Cake349 recipesThe free Flavor Lab newsletter: one surprising pairing a week and the molecular reason it works, in 60 seconds. No spam, unsubscribe anytime.
Prefer an account? Create a free account to save pairings and unlock the full chemistry.