Why it works: Pumpkin and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,350 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓
Abobra Doce
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the pumpkin
Cut the pumpkin into pieces, remove the skin and seeds.
Boil the pumpkin pieces in water until tender, then strain and discard the water.
Make the syrup and soak
For every pound of pumpkin, make a syrup with 1 pound of sugar and ½ cup of water.
Pour the syrup over the pumpkin pieces in an earthen jar.
Every day for seven days, lift the pumpkin out, boil the syrup, and pour it back over the pumpkin.
On the eighth day, boil the pumpkin and syrup together, then remove the pumpkin pieces.
Dry and store
Wash each piece in cold water and place on drainers for a few minutes.
Arrange the pieces on a wooden tray to candy and dry quickly.
Store the candied pumpkin with layers of paper in a box.
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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Pumpkin + sugartop 21% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together2,350 recipes
Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Pumpkin
- Forms the body of the candy and absorbs the sugar syrup as the main edible part.
- Sugar
- Sweetens the pumpkin and, as it concentrates in the syrup, helps preserve and candy the pieces.
The step that matters
Daily syrup boiling over seven days. Repeatedly reboiling the syrup and pouring it back gradually replaces water in the pumpkin with sugar. Boiling the syrup thick enough and returning it each day lets the sugar build up slowly, so the pieces become sweet and firm rather than soggy or syrupy on the outside only.
“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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