thecounterintuitivekitchen

Are you looking for a conceptually muddled dessert featuring two textures that fight each other and an edge of post-prandial danger? For once, I know exactly what to tell you. Peanut brittle with ice cream. 

I started making peanut brittle during the pandemic as a gluten-free thing to give out over the holidays and because I like peanut brittle. On the terror alert scale of allergens, peanut brittle is in the yellow-orange-red zone, because it might kill someone if you don’t research recipients’ allergies and aversions thoroughly. But unlike, say, granola that you think is gluten-free but is not because you accidentally used glutenous oats, peanut brittle will not cause your gluten-sensitive friends and family members to poop uncontrollably and curse your name from the half bathroom by the kitchen. While I am far more concerned about murdering people via anaphylaxis than inconveniencing the gluten-sensitive, it is still terrible to cause my sister anyone to nearly release their organs into the commode. So I am always searching for the right thing to make and give people.

Something that is neither tree nut-filled nor gluten-rich is lemon curd, which I do not like and do not eat but manufacture every December like I’m trying to stock a Vermont country store shelf. A friend made some and brought it to my mother ONE TIME at Christmas years ago, and then wisely stopped making it (it’s labor-intensive) so I started making it and now my mother takes it for granted and jokes with a sort of dead stare that I’m not allowed to come for Christmas without it. This means that my Christmas spirit is: ambivalent. I do not want to make lemon curd but I want to want to make lemon curd, and I must make it so I procrastinate and then I do. I compensate for this half-assery by making peanut brittle because I DO want to make it, and I also want to eat it. But when it comes to peanut brittle that I must present as individual servings to be eaten in company, I lose focus. I now understand that peanut brittle is a solo food that you should eat over the sink or while muted and black-boxed on Zoom.

However, you should make it, because the process of making it combines the volatility of an elementary school science fair with the cathartic smashing of bathroom demolition. Peanut brittle starts with a saucepan full of hot corn syrup, basically, plus sugar, which is like a hot tub with Chris Pratt and Chris Pine in it. As in an imaginary movie where they share top billing, most likely Chris Pine’s potential for greatness would be subdued by and absorbed into Chris Pratt’s vibe, which is what happens with the sugar – it dissolves into the corn syrup.

Once that and some other stuff reaches 300 degrees—which you must verify with a candy thermometer that helpfully lists the conditions associated with different temperatures: Deep Fry, Thread, Soft Ball, Hard Ball, Soft Crack and Hard Crack, the excitement begins. After you reach Hard Crack (!) you take the pan off the heat and add baking soda and butter. I don’t actually know when you are supposed to add the peanuts, but when I added them before reaching Hard Crack’s 300 degrees F, they burned black. If you add them in with the butter and baking soda, they don’t burn.

But this magic happens:

Peanut brittle in its glorious state of achieving self-actualization strikes me as the most terrifying and effective, if fleeting, cauldron occupant, moreso than broth with newt eyes, because it looks like it’s coming for you, and will envelop you and scald you and bind to you forever and ever. But! You just pour it onto a flat surface and it turns into a fawn-colored ice rink with lumps. It cools and hardens, and then you crack it!

If you have a plank of brittle and someone wants a piece of it, what do you do? You huck it against an ancient stone wall or the Gateway Arch or a blacksmith’s forge, so it explodes into portions that you recapture by knee-sliding past while wearing two mitts worn by Boston Red Sox players in the 2004 World Series game four while the Trans-Siberian Orchestra plays the most aggressive version of a carol imaginable.

Or you do this:

Recently, I couldn’t think of or find a good-sounding and manageable gluten-free dessert to bring to a dinner, so I thought: peanut brittle that I will then crush and put on top of vanilla ice cream. But, in the same way that I cannot go all-in on a plan at Christmastime, I was feeling doubtful, and started hedging my bets. I made the peanut brittle and then only crushed some of it. I also harvested the surprising October raspberries from our garden, mixed in some of the strawberries we had grown and frozen, and made a compote that could be a substitute topping. Then I also got chocolate sauce, just to provide so many options that it was all meaningless. 

When I put the bowls of ice cream together, no one opted for any topping other than peanut brittle, probably because I was pretty vague about the range of options and why they existed. Next to scoops of ice cream with crushed brittle on top I wedged great thick shards of peanut brittle. They were sharp as fuck and were not sized or shaped like scoopers, and they were as hard as bullet proof glass, and reminiscent of the security spikes that are used to defend against birds or humans relaxing on public sills or benches. The juxtaposition of ice cream and brittle means that while the ice cream gets melty, the peanut brittle just gets colder and harder, standing there like a guy in the YMCA locker room with an unflagging erection. The brittle also gets a little slippery next to the ice cream and like Louis Zamperini can’t be broken with a spoon or torture, so you find yourself fishing around the bowl trying to get ahold of your weapon and eat it.

Eventually, if you eat it, it’s pretty good, but it auto-fills your tooth crevices so you end up like an ungulate who got veneers on the business end of the tooth. If you’re unlucky or have soft teeth, you get hippo mouth. It also sticks to the front of your teeth. You look like Tamatoa from Moana.

If you exhale in a classroom, you will put six children into anaphylactic shock. If you sneeze and errant brittle flies out you might cut a bitch. You may find a drip of ice cream melting on your jeans alongside a sticky pebble of dropped brittle that you need to pry off with a screwdriver. Everyone just looks kind of tired after such a dessert, and very lightly traumatized, except my dog, Rhoda.