Gebrannte Mandeln
Christmas markets and Chilbis are few and far between this year, so why not create the magical taste of Brönnti Mandle/Gebrannte Mandeln (sugary roasted almonds) at home?
With a watchful eye they are quite easy to make, and wrapped and ribboned they make a great gift too.
With as few as two ingredients, almonds and sugar, most recipes and procedures that I found online and in cookbooks only had minor variations. Swissmilk adds a little sandalwood for colour, and Betty Bossi adds some Espelette pepper, but I prefer a little cinnamon and think it definitely needs a sprinkling of salt too. Marianne Kaltenbach takes the skin off her almonds, though I found this unnecessary.
The hardest part of the process is deciding when to remove the nuts from the pan—ideally it’s a balance between the initial powdery white coating and the eventual crunchy hard caramel—and it took me a few tries to get it perfect.
My default is to always toast nuts that go into a recipe to bring out their flavour, and here it works wonders. The untoasted nuts were slightly mealy, while the toasted ones retained their perfect crunch.
200 g almonds
50 ml water
180 g sugar
pinch of cinnamon
pinch of salt
First, toast your almonds:
Preheat your oven to 180 C / 350 F / gas mark 4.
Spread your almonds on a parchment lined baking sheet. Bake for about 8-10 minutes or until you can smell the nuts and they have darkened slightly (more on toasting nuts here).
Remove the almonds from the baking sheet and put them in a bowl that you can easily pour into the hot sugar later.
Brush off the baking sheet—you can use this to spread out the hot nuts when they are finished cooking.
Now to cook the sugar—you will have to stay at the stove and watch the entire time to make sure nothing burns, so be prepared.
Put the water and then sugar in a medium pot. Without stirring, place over medium high heat and let the sugar dissolve. As soon as the mixture is clear and bubbling, stir in the nuts, then the cinnamon and salt.
Keep stirring—the clear sugar will first coat the nuts. As you keep stirring the sugar will turn white and the nuts will start looking powdery. Keep stirring.
The sugar will start to caramelize a little and again coat the nuts. Keep stirring.
You want the caramel to be between golden and amber coloured, but still see some of the powdery sugar. If you have lots of powdery sugar in the corners of your pan just keep stirring until this melts a bit and starts sticking to the nuts. (This stage takes a little practice—it’s ok if the caramel gets a little darker, just be sure not to let it burn. If you ever feel like things are getting too hot or moving too quickly, just take the pot off the heat.)
Once the nuts are coated, pour them out onto your prepared baking sheet and use your wooden spoon or two forks to separate them a bit. Be careful, they will still be very hot. You don’t have to separate each individual nut, but just make sure there are no big clumps. The will break apart quite easily once they have cooled.
Let cool completely.
Caramelizing sugar can be dangerous work—it is incredibly hot and it can turn from golden to black in a matter of seconds. Keep an eye on it at all times.
If you want to double the recipe, be aware that it will take longer for all the sugar to get powdery and then to caramelize. Just keep stirring, the sugar with get powdery and then caramelly eventually.
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