According to one legend, brittle was invented—accidentally—by a Southern woman in the late 19th century. As the story goes, she was making taffy but accidentally used baking soda in place of cream of tartar. Not wanting to waste the batch, she kept cooking it. The result was not taffy. Instead, thanks to the air pockets introduced by the baking soda (which foams on contact with hot caramel), the episode produced a brittle and deliciously sweet candy.
Sign up for the Dinner Tonight newsletter!
Weeknight cooking inspiration, curated and written by longtime ATK author and editor (and avid home cook) Jack Bishop.
From a food history perspective, this story is likely apocryphal. Many cultures around the world had a version of a hard candy containing nuts or seeds that existed before the 1890s. It’s more likely that what we today call “brittle” emerged as a variation from one or more of those.
However peanut brittle came to be, we’re happy to have it to serve to guests, wrap up as a gift for friends, or even just snack on solo. Most versions follow a simple formula: Make a caramel from butter and sugar, stir in peanuts, add baking soda to make it foam, and then spread out the mixture and allow the candy to set. The result is a treat that snaps when you bite it—a sweet, satisfying shatter, not a jawbreaker.
For this recipe (which also appears in When Southern Women Cook) we took the same route but made a few adjustments to the ingredients and techniques to make it failproof. We opted to make the caramel using water, butter, sugar, and corn syrup; the corn syrup helped prevent sugar crystallization during cooking, something that can make the final candy grainy.
In tests, we cooked this basic mixture to several different temperatures and found that 325 degrees produced the best texture—hard, but easy to break with the teeth. Reducing the heat for the final few minutes of cooking made it easier to achieve that temperature exactly, without going over. (Candy cooks fast, and just a few degrees over can ruin a batch, so watch that thermometer like a hawk.)
Making the Brittle
1. Watch the temperature like a hawk. Just a few degrees can make or break your brittle's texture.
2. Sprinkle brittle with sea salt while it's still hot to ensure that the flakes stick.
We tried just adding the peanuts into this hot syrup, but they brought the temperature down too quickly, which made it hard to spread the mixture into a thin candy. So instead, we decided to heat up the peanuts and add them warm to the hot caramel. After adding the peanuts, we stirred in the baking soda and watched it foam.
Finally, after we quickly spread the hot mixture onto a baking sheet, using a greased silicone spatula to smooth it, we sprinkled it with a little flake sea salt and let it set. Next came the fun part: cracking it into pieces. Peanut brittle for all.
