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Clarification Op Sugar

A process to clarify sugar by boiling with egg whites and water.

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 Op Sugar

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mixture

  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.

Boil and skim

  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
As they heat, they coagulate and trap impurities, which rise to the surface to be skimmed off.
Sugar
Dissolves in the water to form the syrup that is being purified.

The step that matters

Skimming the impurities. Egg whites coagulate as the mixture heats and carry impurities up into a skim. Removing that skim as it forms, and continuing until it is very white, is what clears the syrup. Skimming too early or too little leaves cloudiness behind.

“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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