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Burnt Almonds

A confection of almonds coated in hard sugar syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Burnt Almonds

Why it works: Almond and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 15,679 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Burnt Almonds

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare and coat

  1. Warm the shelled almonds slightly.

  2. Boil the sugar with enough water to reach the hard crack stage (about 300°F or 150°C).

  3. Stir in the almonds with a wooden spoon to coat them with sugar, preventing sticking.

  4. When a crackling sound is heard, remove from heat and stir until the sugar resembles coarse sand.

Build the coating

  1. Pour the mixture onto a wire sieve and cover with paper for 5 minutes.

  2. Pick out the almonds and return the sugar to the saucepan with just enough water to dissolve it.

  3. Repeat the coating process, ensuring the almonds remain separated.

  4. For a thicker coating, repeat 3 to 4 times.

Add the crinkle finish

  1. To make them crinkly, pour the hot syrup over the almonds in two coats, stirring each time.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Almond + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,679 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

Almonds
Form the core that the sugar coating hardens around.
Sugar
Forms a sweet, crisp, grainy coating as it cooks and recrystallises.

The step that matters

Stirring until the sugar resembles coarse sand. Once the syrup reaches the hard crack stage, stirring off the heat makes the sugar recrystallise into a grainy, opaque coating. Stirring too early or too late leaves the coating smooth, sticky, or dull.

“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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