Why it works: Sugar and peanut are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 27% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,545 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓
Peanut Brittle
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the peanuts
Shell the peanuts and remove the brown skin.
Grind the peanuts finely.
Make the brittle
Heat the sugar in a frying pan, stirring constantly until it melts into a syrup.
Add the ground peanuts to the syrup and mix thoroughly.
Quickly pour the mixture onto an unbuttered baking sheet and spread to your desired thickness.
Before it hardens, mark the mixture into squares.
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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Sugar + peanuttop 27% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together2,545 recipes
Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Sugar
- Melts into a syrup that hardens as it cools, forming the brittle's crisp, glassy structure.
- Peanuts
- Provide the main nutty body and texture, suspended throughout the hardened syrup.
The step that matters
Marking the squares before it hardens. Once the sugar cools and sets, it becomes brittle and hard to cut cleanly, so the squares must be scored while the mixture is still pliable.
“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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