The Great Brittle Experiment

Introduction

Lately people have been coming to my blog by running a search for “undercooked peanut brittle”. Having made some myself recently, and not knowing what to do with the stuff, I undertook the experiment that answers the question we all have: is it possible to salvage undercooked peanut brittle?My hypothesis was that while the candy part would return to a syrup that I could heat to the necessary temperature to make the brittle crispy (rather than sticky, as undercooked brittle is), the peanuts might burn in the process. I thought this because in my recipe, I add the peanuts last, just before pouring the brittle out of the pan. I know that recipes exist in which the peanuts are cooked in the syrup to some degree, but my peanuts are already roasted, so I thought that cooking them more might not do good things. And how prescient that thought was…

Procedure

Fig. 1: Large bowl, small microwave

I began by placing the undercooked peanut brittle into a microwave safe bowl, that, unfortunately, was too large for the microwave. After moving the brittle to a smaller bowl, I zapped it until it was syrupy again–this worked pretty well. I moved the goo into a sauce pan, thinking I’d heat to to a bit above 300 degrees–enough to bring it to “hard crack” stage here in the ever-damp Pacific Northwest–and see what happened.

Well, it went along fine for a while. I had the heat up pretty high (as one generally does for brittle), and the temperature rose linearly instead of pausing every ten degrees or so like usual. Around 290 degrees, though, it started to smell burn-y and smoke. Now, normally I can smell a burning-esque smell from the hot butter when I cook brittle, so I held off a bit on pouring it out. However, after about thirty seconds, it became clear to me that something in there really was burning, and I poured it out. Indeed, it was the peanuts.

Results

Fig. 2: The re-cooked (previously undercooked) peanut brittle

Discussion

Now, here’s the thing: I didn’t stir the mixture, and obviously I should have. I was treating it like a standard sugar syrup, which you don’t mess with at all. As you can see, though, the peanuts only burned where they were in contact with the bottom of the pan, not in a general fashion. Also, the candy part of the brittle did crisp up. Thus, my initial hypothesis seems correct, though the experiment failed to produce a terribly tasty result. To improve this procedure, I would recommend stirring the mixture while re-cooking it; if you did that, I believe that it would be possible to salvage an undercooked peanut brittle.