Why it works: Sugar and walnut are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,147 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓
Glace Walnuts
Ingredients
Directions
Make the syrup
Cover the sugar with water in a saucepan.
Boil until the mixture becomes slightly yellow without stirring.
Coat and set the walnuts
Remove from heat and add the walnuts one at a time.
Lift each walnut out with a fork and place on greased plates to harden.
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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Sugar + walnuttop 26% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together7,147 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Granulated sugar
- Forms the syrup that hardens into a crisp, glassy coating on the walnuts.
- Walnuts
- Provide the nut base that the hardened sugar coating clings to and encloses.
The step that matters
Boiling the syrup without stirring. Stirring while sugar syrup boils can cause crystallization, leaving a grainy coating instead of a smooth, glassy one. Watching for the slight yellow colour matters because caramelization adds flavour, and going too far turns the syrup bitter.
“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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