[Sca-cooks] Marzipan ingredients

[Terry Decker]

Commercial marzipan and almond paste often add binding agents, oil, egg, even corn syrup or sorbitol.  Sometimes they add almond extract.  And the price is ridiculous.

Period marzipan tends to be as you describe.  Being lazy, I make mine with almond flour from Natural Grocers, where, when last I checker, I can get 2 or 4 pound bags at a reasonable rate.  For a coarser product (almond paste rather than marzipan), I use almond meal from Sprouts.  I store any unused marzipan as plastic wrapped and bagged one pound loaves in the freezer.

Bear

On 12/25/2020 1:12:36 AM, David Friedman <ddfr at daviddfriedman.com> wrote:
I made some marzipan this evening to go in the stolen my daughter is
making. Her comment was that it wasn't marzipan, it was khushkananaj
filling which, unlike marzipan, she likes. The question is what is the
difference — in particular, is this a difference between the period
version and modern marzipan?

I was working from the description in Martino, complicated by the fact
that he was going on to combine it with wafers and do things with it.
His initial process, which I followed, simply consisted of grinding
blanched almonds, combining with an equal weight of sugar and some rose
water and grinding it all together. Are there other ingredients in
modern marzipan? In period marzipan?

The one difference I observed was that I didn't get the almonds as
finely ground as they are in marzipan I have had, but that should have
only affected texture, and Rebecca's comment was about taste.

--
David Friedman/Cariadoc
www.daviddfriedman.com
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/

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