Almond Paste
What is Almond Paste?
Almond paste is prepared by grounding almond meal or almonds and some sugar, usually 50-55%, by adding minimal amount of cooking oil, few beaten eggs and some corn syrup or heavy cream for binding the ingredients.
Almond paste is quite similar to marzipan but latter has more sugar as compared to almond paste and also contain few other ingredients like food colors and preserves.
The sugar content of almond paste is around 50-55% as compared to 74-83% in marzipan. Almond paste is used in filling pastries but is also used extensively in chocolates and other preparations. Sometimes peach kernels and apricot is added to the commercially manufactured almond paste to keep its overall cost down.
Uses of Almond Paste
Almond paste is extensively used for filling the pastries in various cultures. It is the main ingredient of American bear claw pastry. Almond paste finds use in many cookies and pastry preparations in Scandinavia.
In Sweden, almond paste is added to buns, biscuits and muffins and is also used for filling spring season pastry called semla. Its liberal dose is added to the Christmas and Easter sweets as well.
Almond paste is used in the stuffed brown spiced biscuits in Netherlands. Christmas bread called Kerststol is filled using almond paste and is consumed as a Christmas breakfast.
Almond paste is popular in Denmark too and is known as marcipan there. Here it is extensively used in pastries.
French traditional calisson candy in the Aix-en-Provence has almond paste as one of its main ingredient. Chinese prefer to use the almond paste in their sweetheart cakes.
Germans too like to fill their pastries with almond paste. It is used in the preparation of sweets also. It is called Lu’becker Edelmarzipan in German!
How to Make Almond Paste
Ingredients:
- 10 oz of dried blanched almonds
- 10 oz of powdered sugar
- 5 oz of granulated sugar
- 1/4 cup of corn syrup
- 1 cup of water
Instructions:
Place the water, sugar and corn syrup in a saucepan. Stir it to combine. Bring it to a boil and let it boil for a few moments. Let the sugar syrup cool.
Process almonds to a fine powder in a food processor. Add the powdered sugar. With the food processor running, slowly add the sugar syrup until the mixture forms a paste. Store the almond paste tightly covered. For more than a week store in the refrigerator.