Name: Clarifying Sugar for Candy Making
Ingredients: 1 cup cold water; 4 cups granulated or loaf sugar; 1 cup warm water; 1 egg white (for brown/yellow sugar); ½ egg white (for soft white sugar); ¼ egg white (for refined/loaf sugar)

Why it works: Sugar and egg 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 ↓

Clarifying Sugar for Candy Making

Ingredients

1 cup cold water
4 cups granulated or loaf sugar
1 cup warm water
1 egg white (for brown/yellow sugar)
½ egg white (for soft white sugar)
¼ egg white (for refined/loaf sugar)

Directions

Prepare the mixture

Beat the egg white with cold water in a clean saucepan.
Add sugar and warm water to the pan.

Clarify

Heat the mixture moderately until scum rises.
Remove from heat and skim off the scum.
Repeat heating and skimming until no scum rises.

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.

Sugar + eggtop 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

Granulated or loaf sugar: Forms the sweet base that is dissolved and purified.
Egg white: Its proteins set when heated and trap impurities, which rise as scum.
Warm water: Dissolves the sugar so impurities can separate from it.

The step that matters

Repeat heating and skimming until no scum rises. Egg white proteins set as the mixture heats and carry suspended impurities up to the surface. Any scum left behind stays in the sugar and makes it cloudy, so stopping early spoils the clarity.

“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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Clarifying Sugar for Candy Making