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Orange Sticks

Orange peel sticks are candied orange peel strips cooked in a sugar syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,212 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Orange Sticks

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the peel

  1. Cut the peels of the oranges into small strips.

  2. Boil the strips in three separate waters to remove the bitter taste.

Make the candied peel

  1. Make a syrup by combining the sugar and water in a saucepan.

  2. Add the drained orange peels to the syrup and boil until they absorb all the syrup. Remove from heat.

Finish

  1. Roll each strip in granulated sugar.

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.

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. Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Orange and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Oranges
Provide the peel, which carries the flavour and becomes the candy itself.
Granulated sugar
Sweetens the peel and, as syrup, is absorbed into it, then coats the finished strips.
Water
Dissolves the sugar into a syrup that the peel soaks up.

The step that matters

Boil the strips in three separate waters. Changing the water removes bitter compounds stored in the peel's white pith. Skipping a change leaves the candy 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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