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Salted Almonds (Tablespoon olive oil Salt)
1 tablespoon olive oil Salt 1/2 pound almonds Heat the oil; add the blanched almonds (which must be dry); cook to a delicate brown, shaking the dish constantly and stirring to prevent burning. Drain the almonds on paper, sprinkling them with fine salt.
A chafing-dish recipe that works just as well in a skillet, provided the nuts are bone dry before they meet the oil.
- Dry means dryAlmonds still damp from blanching will spit in hot oil. After blanching, spread them on a towel and let them air-dry for an hour, or dry them in a 200F oven for ten minutes.
- One tablespoon is enoughThis is a shallow fry, not a deep one. The half pound of almonds should be barely slicked with oil; add more only if the pan looks dry partway through.
- Heat and timingMedium heat, and count on six to ten minutes. Almonds go from pale gold to burnt in under a minute at the end, and they keep cooking after they leave the pan, so pull them a shade lighter than you want.
- The chafing dishThe instruction to shake "the dish" suggests a chafing dish over a spirit lamp, which gives gentle heat; a heavy skillet is steadier but faster. Either way, keep the nuts moving as the recipe directs.
- Salt while hotFine salt clings only to the film of oil still warm on the nuts. Salt them the moment they hit the paper, not after they cool.
- BlanchingIf you are starting from skin-on almonds, cover them with boiling water for one minute, drain, and pinch the skins off. Supermarket blanched almonds skip the step entirely.
- YieldHalf a pound serves eight to ten as a cocktail nut. Keep them in an airtight tin; they are best eaten within a week or two, after which the oil begins to taste stale.
Salted almonds were a fixture of the American formal table around 1900, set out in small silver or cut-glass dishes at each place setting rather than passed as a snack, and they turn up in menus of the period alongside olives and celery as part of the opening course. The era also saw a vogue for the chafing dish among hostesses, when cooking a small dish at the table or in the drawing room was itself part of the entertainment. Almonds had long been blanched and fried in oil around the Mediterranean, and the technique here is often said to descend from that older practice.