Pecan Brittle Recipe | My Baking Addiction (2024)

FAQs

Why add baking soda to brittle? ›

Baking soda is a key ingredient in peanut brittle. It's what aerates the candy, giving it a nice light crunch.

In a nonstick saucepan, heat and stir sugar, corn syrup, water and salt over medium heat until sugar has dissolved. Over high heat, using a candy thermometer, cook sugar mixture to a hard crack stage (290 °F). Add pecans and butter and cook to 300 °F stirring all the time to keep the nuts from burning.

Without glucose syrup, the peanut brittle will recrystallize and develop a crumbly, gritty texture. Read more about corn syrup below. Peanuts: Use the raw, blanched peanuts. They cook in the syrup and will develop plenty of roasted, nutty caramelized flavor from the candy making process itself.

This is a temperature issue. Make sure the candy reaches exactly 300ºF / 149ºC, which is hard crack stage, before pouring onto baking sheet. See “Equipment Used to Make Peanut Brittle” for my recommended thermometer. If you're peanut brittle is still chewy after it cools, you may be able to save it!

It's important not to use too much baking soda in recipes, as it can result in a metallic, soapy flavor. It is much more powerful than baking powder – you only need about 1/4 teaspoon baking soda per cup of flour to leaven baked goods.

Baking powder is better for recipes that contain little or no acid ingredients. Baking soda helps make fried foods crispy and light. It is also useful for cleaning and removing stains.

Store the brittle in an airtight container at room temperature for up to 1 month to maintain the crisp. Moisture in the refrigerator would soften the brittle.

Brittles are typically composed mostly of sugar, while toffees contain a fair amount of butter and in some cases milk. This makes toffees fuller and richer in taste, while brittles are more purely sweet and sugary. Brittles are also much thinner than most toffees.

Pralines have a lot in common with nut brittle, with the difference being mostly in the addition of cream and the cooking temperature––the sugary syrup used to coat pralines is heated to a soft-ball consistency, a lower temperature than the hard-crack stage of peanut brittle.

What Makes it Brittle? The sugar will be cooked to 300ºF (149ºC)—hard crack stage; which when set up would be hard like a lollipop. But peanut brittle is delicate and you can easily bite into it—how? The secret is in the baking soda.

How do you know when brittle is ready? ›

Recipe Tip

If you don't have a candy thermometer, in Step 5, try dropping a small amount of the boiling syrup into a bowl of cold water. If it forms hard, brittle threads, it's ready.

Baking soda creates small air bubbles in brittle, giving it a little extra crunchy texture. Why is my peanut brittle bitter? If your peanut brittle is bitter, it could be because the sugar got burnt while cooking. If it reaches above 350F, it will likely have a burnt and bitter flavor.

As the water converts to steam, the monosaccharides begin to saturate the solution, increasing their tendency to form crystals and precipitate, which results in a gritty brittle. To prevent this, you need to interfere with the ability of fructose to rejoin dextrose.

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.

I recommend placing pieces of wax paper or parchment paper between the candy pieces to keep them from sticking together. I do not recommend placing your brittle in the refrigerator (remember, humidity is the biggest enemy of candy, even after it's done cooking!).

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.

Baking soda becomes activated when it's combined with both an acidic ingredient and a liquid. Upon activation, carbon dioxide is produced, which allows baked goods to rise and become light and fluffy (1).

Baking soda releases bubbles into our candy (you can see this on a more extreme level in my honeycomb recipe, which uses 5x the amount of baking soda!). This makes the brittle more delicate, crisp, and less chewy, which ultimately makes it more snappy and less likely to obnoxiously stick to your teeth.

The egg floats in baking soda water too because baking soda is a kind of salt. It dissolves in water and makes it denser, just like table salt does. In addition to that, baking soda has another property! When dissolved in water, some part of the baking soda forms carbon dioxide gas.