My Dad's perfect peanut brittle recipe, refined and perfected over 20 years | Cool Mom Eats (2024)

FAQs

Why put baking soda in peanut brittle? ›

Baking soda is a key ingredient in peanut brittle. It's what aerates the candy, giving it a nice light crunch. Why didn't my homemade peanut brittle get hard? The main reason why peanut brittle doesn't get hard and have the crunch we expect is because the sugar was not cooked long enough.

To store: Once it's completely cooled, store peanut brittle in an airtight container at room temperature. Do not refrigerate as the moisture from the fridge will cause the brittle to soften. Store for 6-8 weeks. To Freeze: Peanut brittle can be frozen and stored up to 3 months.

Peanut brittle has one redeeming quality: peanuts. Outside of that single ingredient, peanut brittle is painfully unhealthy. It contains: sugar, corn syrup, and butter, all of which are unhealthy for your body in different ways.

Peanut brittle is cooked to the hard-crack stage. It's called that because it's the point when a drop of boiling sugar syrup immersed into cold water will separate into hard, brittle threads. While toffee is made with similar ingredients, it is cooked to a lower temperature: the hard-ball stage.

If your peanut brittle is not hardening, it's because the sugar mixture did not get hot enough to properly caramelize, cool and become hard, crisp and crunchy. If you have this issue, next time, use a thermometer to make sure the peanut brittle mixture gets to 300°F.

The candy will attract moisture from the air, making it unpleasantly sticky instead of shatteringly crisp. Once it's completely cool, transfer it to an airtight container.

What's important to know is that the corn syrup controls the grain of the brittle so adding too little and you have a grainy textured brittle, while adding too much will result in a stringy and sticky brittle.

Melt butter in a saucepan over medium heat. Stir sugar and salt with melted butter to dissolve completely. Remove saucepan from heat, add peanuts, and stir to coat completely; immediately pour onto prepared pan and spread into an even layer. Refrigerate until brittle, at least 30 minutes.

To keep the brittle light and airy, do not spread or flatten the mixture.

This is one small square of Carolina Reaper peanut brittle, the world's hottest pepper, and dusted with a LOVELY coating of Ghost Pepper. The One Chunk Challenge is intended for adults of 18+ years only, and is done at your own risk.

Can you overcook peanut brittle? ›

If you overcook the brittle, it could be bitter or burnt. If you undercook it, the brittle won't properly set and the end result will be sticky.

Heavy 6 quart Dutch Oven pot. Mine is an old 1970's Club Aluminum. It's perfect! You need a heavy THICK pot so it won't scorch.

Didn't get it hot enough. You have to hit hard crack stage heat or it's not going to harden. From internet: Hard-Crack Stage is a cooking term meaning that a sugar syrup being heated has reached 149 – 154 C (300 – 310 F.) It is a test of how hot a sugar syrup is, and of how much water is left in it.

Those other liquid sugars have impurities that will burn at the higher temperature of making caramel, leading to a bitter-tasting brittle.

I've learned that brittle is better when made on a cool, dry day. When I've made the candy on a warmer, humid day, it tends to be a stickier brittle. This is because the brittle takes longer to cool, and it reaches a point where it is no longer evaporating moisture into the air.

Baking soda helps to aerate brittle — it literally makes the molten candy bubble in the pot — to create a brittle with an airy, almost honeycomblike texture that crunches easily when eaten.

The candy syrup is slightly acidic. When baking soda is added, it reacts with the acid and releases bubbles of carbon dioxide. This makes the syrup foam and expand so the finished candy is not so hard and dense.