Homemade Peanut Brittle

    My email inbox is inundated daily with recipes and other food related information. Serious Eats, Cooking.com, Time Out New York, America's Test Kitchens, etc. all send me multiple emails a day. Usually, I take a quick look and delete them. However, last week, I received an email from Tasting Table with a recipe called "Grandma Frankie's Peanut Brittle" adapted from Melissa Perello (one of Food & Wine's Best New Chefs in 2004) from the Frances restaurant in San Francisco. For some reason I wasn't so quick to delete this one. Probably because I really love peanut brittle and since I have never made it before, it stuck out to me.

So this weekend, I decided to give it a shot. Most of the ingredients are house hold staples; granulated sugar, unsalted butter, vanilla extract, water and baking soda. And the remaining two ingredients, are nothing too extreme; light corn syrup and raw peanuts. Raw peanuts meaning peanuts that have not been roasted or treated already. These may be a little bit harder to find than anything else. Any specialty market, health food grocer or high-end market (such as Whole Foods or Fairway) should carry them.

Here is the recipe:

Ingredients:          2 cups granulated sugar

1 cup light corn syrup

1/2 cup cold water

2 cups raw peanuts

1 teaspoon unsalted butter

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 tablespoon baking soda

Directions: 

1. In a large saucepan over high heat, combine the sugar, corn syrup and water. Bring to a boil and reduce the heat to medium-high. Cook undisturbed until a candy thermometer registers 260˚, about 20 minutes. Reduce the heat to medium-low and add the peanuts. Wait 5 seconds, then give the mixture a brief stir. Continue cooking, swirling the saucepan occasionally to prevent scorching, until the mixture turns deep golden brown, about 3 minutes.

 

2. Remove the saucepan from the heat and stir in the butter and vanilla. Add the baking soda (the mixture will foam) and stir until incorporated.

3. Pour the peanut mixture onto a rimmed baking sheet lined with a silicone mat or parchment paper, and spread into an even layer. Let the brittle stand until cool and hard, about 25 minutes. Break the peanut brittle into pieces and store in an airtight container at room temperature for up to a month.

Recipe notes: Definitely put the sugar, corn syrup and water mixture in the biggest sauce pan you have. Adding the baking soda during the last step, will cause the mixture to foam and almost double in volume. 

I didn't have a rimmed baking sheet to use for this so I used a pyrex casserole dish instead (above). This caused the time that the brittle needed to rest and cool to be much longer than the 25 minutes suggested in the recipe. 

The final product was delicious. I was surprised that there was no salt in the recipe. It seemed like a perfect match for peanuts and would also create a salty caramel brittle. Also, the final product was a little bit wet on the surface and came off on my fingers, which in no way deterred me from eating half on my own.