I didn't realize the ruckus that the revival of the Chocolate-Covered Caramel Matzoh Crunch would cause! But if it's any consolation to the new generation of fans—I, too, ate almost a whole batch by myself before making another so don't feel so bad if it had the same effect on you.
Oy!
I thought this was a good time to finally do Part II of the promised caramel post, which I started here.
Then I was sidetracked. And then I got into a little round-robin about caramel and butterscotch with Michael Ruhlman and Shuna.
Since it seemed like heaven and earth were in collusion, I felt a prodding to continue to delve deeper into caramel. So I thought this was a good time to talk about How To Make The Perfect Caramel.
When writing a recipe, for books or online, one of the biggest conundrums is "How explanatory should you be?"
Page space is limited in books and honestly, people would freak if you published a 6-page full-on manifesto for making brownies—so you need to strive for a happy medium.
Speaking of happy mediums...enter the internet!
Now it's simpler to explain techniques and I can add all the photos I want, bandwidth providing.
I've been making a lot of caramel lately—what 'til you see what I've got on the docket next—but for now, I though I'd talk about how to make the perfect batch of caramelized sugar. (Be sure to read my Ten Tips For Making Caramel, part I.)
This post is not a specific recipe, but a technique; there's no exact ingredients or proportions given. It's meant to demystify caramelizing and there's some great recipes in the previous post with tips for you to try.
Dry vs Wet Caramel
There's 2 different kinds of basic caramel: a wet caramel, where sugar is melted with water then cooked, and a dry caramel, where sugar is cooked by itself until it liquefies and caramelizes. Because sugar is partially water, heat liquefies it. That's why many of those low-fat desserts were full of sugar. Sugar makes things moist. Remember that next time you're thinking about reducing sugar in a recipe.
For our purposes here, I'll be talking about making a dry caramel, which I think is less-temperamental. The most important thing to know about making caramel is this: be sure to cook it to just the right color and flavor. Undercooked caramel just tastes sweet, and burnt caramel tastes...burned and will be unusable.
In the previous post, a few asked about using a thermometer. I once used a professional candy thermometer for a recipe I was making and the darn thing melted into an extremely unappetizing (and expensive) mess. So I think it's better just to learn to rely on your nose and your eyes. Like grilling a steak, a thermometer can be useful, but there's nothing like your senses to tell you when food is prepared to your liking.
Important!
Here's a few safety precautions you should take:
When Is It Done?
Not having the sugar become a grainy mess is your second biggest-challenge when making caramel. The first is getting it to just the right color; no more, no less.
The color can be best described as that of an old copper penny. Perfect caramel should be cooked until it's dark, reddish-brown, and just past the point where it starts to smoke. Some recipes advise cooking caramel until it 'starts' to smoke—but that's too soon. The picture above, or me pouring caramel, is exactly the right color.
I take a sniff once it begins to turn amber-colored and darken; if you keep smelling it, it's fairly easy to gauge when it goes from slightly-cooked...to almost-there...to deep, rich-caramel perfection. If you screw it up, a cup of sugar is pretty cheap in case you overdo it (cheaper than that thermometer...) and after you make caramel once or twice, you should get the hang of it.
If you're recipe calls for adding liquid, re-check my previous tips for advice. If your recipe calls for using the hot caramel straight, as advised by your recipe, you may want to put some icy water in a sink or a very large bowl so when the sugar reaches the right temperature, you can set the pan in the ice, which will stop the cooking quickly.
Tools
Lastly, you don't need any fancy equipment like giant copper kettles. A good saucepan or skillet will do. (I use this pan for almost everything.) Whatever pan you use, make sure it's light-colored, heavy-duty and solid. And any utensils, like spatulas you'll be using to stir should be able to withstand the heat. Most of the new silicone tools and mats are fine since they can take it up to at least 400F (200C), although you might want to check with the manufacturer if you're not absolutely certain, to avoid any meltdowns.
Making The Perfect Caramel
1. Start with an even layer of sugar in a heavy-duty pan, such as a deep skillet.
Heat the sugar over moderate heat, keeping an eye on it. The main trick at this point is that sometimes it'll start burning in a spot beneath the surface, especially if the sugar is pretty deep. But in general, it should start to liquefy at the edge first with perhaps a few blips near the middle.
2. Once the caramel starts browning at the edges, begin to drag the sugar towards towards the center to prevent any burnt spots. Once burnt, caramel can't be saved so don't let anything get to dark.
It will usually start to take on a nice, mellow brown color....
At this stage, will quickly turn darker, so pay attention!
3. If your caramel looks very lumpy and grainy, don't worry. Just lower the heat and keep stirring. Any stubborn chunks should melt. If not, they can be strained out later and should be such a small quantity that they won't likely won't affect the outcome of the recipe.
4. Help!
Ok, what happened here was it got stirred too much and the sugar lumped up before it had a chance to melt and liquefy. I know, you were trying to hurry up. But all is not lost...
Continue cooking over very low heat, stirring as little as possible.
It will come right back to being smooth. Any stubborn little bits can be strained out.
This post is extremely easy to follow. Thank you for making carmelizing understandable. :)
i'm sure you've heard this a million times, but you are awesome! i've been reading your site for a couple of days now, going further and further into the archives. i'm thoroughly enjoying every minute of it!! this post was incredibly helpful!!
that caramel ice cream photo is staring back at me! i am slowly working my way through your ice cream book. i may have to make ice cream tonight. thanks a lot! :-P
this pictorial is just what i needed - i almost always get gun-shy and take my caramel off the heat way too early, or end up with something so burnt tasting that the complexity of the bittersweet sugar is lost.
also, the picture of the caramel ice cream is making me want to haul out the ice cream maker despite the current temperature of 29 degrees.
Oh my gosh, I'm totally with Marni and Michelle--I've been dreaming about that caramel ice cream! I have The Perfect Scoop but missed the 60-degree "heat wave" we had here in upstate New York in the beginning of January, and I just haven't been quite brave enough to try that ice cream. I got an ice-cream maker attachment for my KitchenAid for Christmas (and The Perfect Scoop) and will, with the help of your blog, David, try making caramel ice cream soon! Thank you for your careful instructions and wonderful pictures. Being able to see what the caramelizing process looks like is essential for me.
Are you telling us that your next book will be on Caramel ?? yum
i hope you always have a blog to share your great writing and pictures!
David,
Thanks for all the great posts! I really look forward to reading you blogs and always get excited when your RSS feed updates. =)
Tonight some friends and I were discussing the possibility of making caramel with things other than sugar. I haven't quite figured this one out yet - is it possible to make caramel with date sugar? What about with honey? Or agave? I imagine that it might be possible to make something similar to straight up sugar-caramel, but not identical. Have you experimented with non-(table)-sugar caramels?
In reading through a few of my cookbooks it seems that caramel (in the sugary sense) happens when sucrose is being broken down - is it possible to make caramel when that sucrose is mixed with all sorts of other types of sugars (like fructose)? Are there some compounds that inhibit the formation of caramel (i.e. if there are other non-sugar complex carbohydrates present will that cause a problem?)
Have any of the rest of you thought about or experimented with making caramel with different sugar alternatives?
thanks for the post david and the enormously informative pix.
would have loved to learn how you use various enrichers and how thin you like a sauce. if i recall you use slightly more cream than sugar in your caramel sauce in the book. spirits and extracts can flavor caramel, but would you ever use juices? but you'd have had to have written 30 pages.
coincidentally, bittman's recipe column today has what he calls a French walnut tart--which is caramel sauce poured into a shell with walnuts
Hi Michael: Each sauce recipe I have is different, and I don't have a standard formula. I have used fruit juices in my books, but you have to be careful with citrus juice since, as you know, it can get bitter if overheated.
I did see Mark Bittman's recipe for Caramel Walnut Tart that was in the NYTimes, and I watched the video. Will all respect, it didn't look very caramelized to me. The mixture was pretty light when he added the butter and cream, and then he just put it in the refrigerator.
I'd take it darker myself, but I like my caramel very rich and deeply-colored.
(He also said "If they had pecans in France I'm sure they would use them". We do have pecans here; noix de pecan.)
Caramel scared me. It did. It is my favorite candy but the thought of making it freaked me out... no longer my friend.... no longer.
I just want to thank you so much for your blog, which I read avidly. I made my first batch of ice-ream with your vanilla recipe. I do not own an ice-cream machine, but it was the weekend and I was at home cooking anyway, so I set a timer and stirred. I added 200 ml of elderflower cordial to your recipe and made elderflower ice cream. It was heaven and I would never have tried it if it weren't for you! Can caramel ice cream be far behind? I think not!
Great info, I'll use it when I dare make some.
"sugar is mostly water" ??
Ben: Don't know the exact proportion of water, so modified wording in post. -d
I think sugar is hydrophilic, which means it loves water and will pull humidity out of the air to keep things moist. That causes problems with caramels, which if they aren't wrapped in a waterproof paper or plastic will absorb water and get softer over time.
David, thanks for reminding us that however daunting caramel may be, unlike twitchy recipes that may go wrong at the end, with caramel if you burn the sugar, starting over is easy. You'll have only lost some cheap sugar, not raw cream, single-source chocolate, or the custard you made with your last vanilla bean.
Great picture explanation David.
Thanks for the tips David! I've never tried a dry caramel before, but it doesn't look to much harder than the wet method. You had said in the previous comments that you'd talk about using additions like corn syrup to a wet caramel - is there another caramel-making post coming?
Anyway, I've always made my caramel sauce with cream. How is the sauce with butter different? What kind of butter:sugar ratio do you use?
I'm loving all the caramel posts!
David,
Thanks for all the info on Caramel. It's one of those things I've always been scared of. I used to work at Pix Patisserie in Portland. Lots of time when we made dry carmels we used a conbination of sugar and glucose. Do you know how glucose changes the end product?
I made caramel for the first time last night - the espresso caramels from 101Cookbooks. Really incredibly good. They're a little soft, but honestly who cares? And I've decided that I'm going to cook the caramel a little less done and keep it as a syrup to add to Italian Meringue Buttercream and then I'll have the most amazing caramel coffee icing known!
I'll be interested to try your method with sugar (the one from yesterday used honey)!
Chocolate, port and an afternoon with Olivier...I'm sooooo jealous.
Hi David
Visting your blog for the first time and i must say, i can a learn a lot from your posts. Thanks for sharing your culinary sklills.
Okay, so I just had a wondering here...
I have always been taught that you do not want to change the temperature of a metal too quickly. For example, if I have a hot pan that I need to cool to use for something else, I was taught to run it under hot water, gradually adding cooler water, then turning the hot down until eventually the water is running cold, and the pan was cooled slowly.
Something about the metal not being able to take the rapid changes in temperature and having a tendency to warp or bend...
So, I was wondering about that when you said to put the pan in ice water to stop the cooking when the caramel is at the perfect state...would that not potentially damage the pan???
By the way, I do enjoy your writing...always very entertaining!
Hi Susan: You'll notice I mentioned to use a heavy-duty piece of cookware. I use my All-Clad pan for this, and never have any problems.
But any thick, solid pot or pan shouldn't warp.
(Thanks for your compliment too!)
This is marvellous David! Oh, and I SOOOO think books should have 6 pages on making caramel. Absolutely.
On my list of things to do tonight: make caramel...and Ive been drooling over your caramel ice cream recipe for ages, I really need to bite the bullet and make some.
Okay, that makes sense that a heavier pan would not be as much of a problem. Thank you for the clarification.
I did look at your link for the pan and...well...Good Lord, I should hope it wouldn't warp at 200 bucks a pop!!! It does look like a really wonderful pan though, so I guess I will have to start saving my nickels...lol
I do have some nice stuff, but still have to work on getting a few of the better quality items...unfortunately for me, cooking is only a hobby and bills have to come first...
But yeah, I will definitely be trying this sometime soon.
Have a wonderful day.
Hi Susan: Yes, that pan is pricey. But that's what I use, and love it. And I didn't want to recommend something that I hadn't personally used.
KitchenAid offers a line of inexpensive cookware that seems similar, like this 4.75qt pan for just only $49 (or the whole set for $159)
You can sometimes find deals in discount stores, although a cheap pan is not necessarily a good deal if it burn things : )
Hi i am visiting ur site for the first time and i am really happy to have come across this post.I have had bad experiences making a good caramel but now seeing this post i am sure i can make it better.Thanks for sharing ur culinary skills with us.I will be visiting ur site often now and add u to my blogroll.have a nice day!!!
Thanks for these tips and photos...most helpful! I've been struggling with the "wet" method in a dark, non-stick saucepan...not good. I have one really good piece of cookware, a Demeyere 9.5" frying pan, which proved invaluable for this process. With such a heavy pan and great heat distribution, I can avoid stirring too much and just let the pan do the work. In fact, since it retains so much heat, I have to start pouring a bit before it's done as it will burn while I'm putting the caramel in the ramekins. I'll never go wet again!
Thanks so much for writing this as a method. I've been looking all afternoon for a decent spun sugar recipe, and they all have the most insane proportions. How much spun sugar does a girl need?! By absorbing the "science" behind it I can make it any amount I need. Yay.
Wonderful article on caramel - I've never seen it so dark! Probably because mine has a hefty dose of cream, honey, and of course, butter.
Teal - I'm currently experimenting with using cane sugar, honey, and agave nectar (trying to get rid of corn syrup). Email me if you want an update. As regards to not using white sugar at all, I believe it's fairly unique in the way that it caramelizes: thoughts?