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Clarification of Sugar

A process to clarify sugar by boiling it with egg whites and water, skimming impurities.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 122,807 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Clarification of Sugar

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Beat the egg whites in a bowl.

  2. Gradually add 1 quart of water for each egg white.

  3. Break the sugar into pieces and add it to the water.

Clarify the sugar

  1. Boil the mixture and skim off any impurities.

  2. Continue adding the remaining water gradually.

  3. When the skim is very white, the sugar is clarified.

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. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 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

Egg whites
Coagulate as they heat and trap impurities, which rise to the surface to be skimmed off.
Water
Dissolves the sugar and carries the egg whites so they can be spread through the liquid.
Sugar
Is the substance being purified; it dissolves into the water to form the syrup.

The step that matters

Adding the water gradually and skimming during the boil. Egg white proteins set slowly as the liquid heats. Adding water gradually keeps them dispersed so they can bind impurities, and skimming removes that coagulated material before it breaks apart and clothings the syrup.

“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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