Reply to "PICS Smoked Spicy Maple Almonds"

I thought about using local honey for this recipe as it can be roughly about half the costs of maple syrup in this part of the U.S. So I started by simply replacing the maple syrup with honey. This worked fine up to a point; the smoky spicy honey flavor was great, but no matter how long I worked with them, carefully separating each one, when they were cooled and put in a container they would end up sticking together. So it appears that honey is inherently quite sticky even when the moisture content is reduced by the smoking process. After a bit more research I experimented with coating the finished product. What I ended up with was a coating consisting of 2 tbsp granulated sugar, 1/2 tsp salt and 1/2 tsp CS Rib Rub. This coating will stick to the honey coating on the nuts and keep them from forming a stuck together mass of nuts.

The process I followed was to put the hot nuts, as they come out of the smoker, into a good sized mixing bowl. I then sprinkled the sugar spice mixture over the hot nuts and tossed them with my hands to evenly coat each almond. Continue mixing the nuts bringing them from the bottom of the bowl to top so that each nut is coated with the sugar coating as they cool, separating any nuts that may tend to stick together. Continue in this fashion for several minutes until the nuts are sufficiently cooled. Place bowl of nuts in the fridge to completely cool for about an hour or so. Remove bowl from fridge and stir with your hands again to see that they are fully cooled. Now the nuts can be packaged in an airtight container and they won't clump together in one big mass.

This process will only use about half of the sugar/spice mix. So it adds roughly 1 tbsp of sugar and 1/4 tsp of salt to each one pound of nuts. The smoky spicy honey flavor is not compromised by this added step and the end product is much easier to handle.