Microwave Peanut Brittle Recipe (2024)

FAQs

Why is my microwave peanut brittle chewy? ›

Adding baking soda when making peanut brittle makes the hot sugar syrup foam, creating lots of tiny air bubbles that give the candy the porous, crispy honeycomb texture it's known for. Why didn't my peanut brittle turn out? If your peanut brittle is light in color and chewy, it was not cooked long enough.

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. The sugar needs to be cooked to what is called the hard crack stage, 300ºF.

If you do NOT have a thermometer, here's what you do. Take a very small cup of cold water and drop a bit of the mixture in. If it dissolves into the water, it's not ready. Mine took 18 minutes to reach the correct temperature, so around 15 minutes start trying the water test.

Baking soda is also very important at this stage since it reacts to the heat, creating carbon dioxide that aerates the caramel, enabling it to snap when someone bites into it rather than requiring them to gnaw at it until it breaks or pulls apart.

You can try placing the stale peanut brittle on a baking sheet and gently heating it in an oven at a low temperature, around 250°F (120°C), for a few minutes. This can help to soften it a bit and restore some of its original texture.

Why is it too hard? Using baking soda usually prevents peanut brittle from being too, well, brittle. However, if you cook the candy past the set temperature or overwork the candy once you spread it out onto the cookie sheet, that can cause it to become very hard and difficult to bite through.

It is important to coat cookie sheets with butter and put in the freezer to get them really cold before you need to pour the brittle. After you pour the candy you should put the pans in the fridge or outside if it is cold, so the brittle will set up quickly and stay fluffy.

Dried peanuts may require boiling up to 24 hours until they soften. If your water is hard, full of minerals, or you are boiling at high altitude, then your boiling times for dried peanuts may be greater than 24 hours.

When candy cools slowly on a stone slab, more crystals have a chance to form. With a higher number of micro-crystals, the sugar has more sites on which to crystallize, and so crystallization ultimately happens faster.

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.

Should homemade peanut brittle be refrigerated? ›

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.

You will want the cookie sheet to be non-stick. Use parchment paper, a silicone baking sheet or a greased cookie sheet. Spread the peanut brittle as thin as you can. Immediately add your sea salt.

How Long Does Peanut Brittle Last? Properly stored (in an airtight container at room temperature), peanut brittle will last one to two months.

Buttering the inside of the cooking pan will prevent sugar crystals from sticking to the sides while the corn syrup, water, sugar and butter cook to 275 degrees. At that stage the peanuts are added and the mixture is cooked, stirring constantly, until it reaches 300 degrees.

When one of those sugar molecules reaches 212 degrees Fahrenheit, it melts, which softens it. This is why bread can actually feel soft and fluffy when it first comes out of the microwave. But then when it cools, that molecule recrystallizes and hardens, causing the bread to become chewy and hard.

It all boils down to the natural sugars found in flour. Flour, milled from wheat, contains gluten (a type of protein) and sugars (which form starch when their molecules are chained together). When these sugars are heated, they melt and then quickly recrystallize, resulting in an undesirable chewy texture.

Low and slow. Simmering the syrup for English toffee to the requisite 300°F temperature can (and should) be a slow process — up to 20 minutes or so. Don't hurry this gradual transformation; syrup that doesn't reach 300°F, or close to it, will make candy with timid flavor and chewy (not crunchy) texture.

The peanuts will be slightly underdone (a little chewy) when you remove them from the oven, but they will continue to cook once you remove them. Allow to cool for 5 minutes.