Homemade Caramel Sauce Recipe (2024)

FAQs

Do you stir constantly when making caramel? ›

Swirl, don't stir: While slow, deliberate stirring will help the sugar dissolve evenly, you want to stop stirring once it has fully melted.

Caramel sauce is a wonderful topping for ice cream, cake, pie, and bread pudding. While a typical caramel recipe calls for heavy cream, what if you don't have any handy? This easy recipe uses milk and butter instead, ingredients you're more likely to have on hand.

The main ingredient for making a caramel is sugar. A liquid caramel can be made using any quantity of sugar or water just as long as it follows the ratio of 2 parts sugar: 1 part water.

Combine brown sugar, butter, and milk in a saucepan and bring ingredients to a boil. Remove thickened mixture from heat before adding (optional) vanilla extract. Let the caramel cool slightly before using. The result is an impossibly rich sauce that is guaranteed to satisfy your sweet tooth.

Stirring the sugar

If the melting sugar splashes up onto the sides of the pan, it quickly loses its moisture content and forms back into crystals. That can set off a chain reaction that can cause caramel to seize up, ruining the entire batch.

To avoid burning the caramel, it's just a matter of being vigilant. The melted sugar should be cooked until it's a deep amber colour — it's done when it starts to smoke and begins to foam just a little bit. At this point, it should be removed from the heat immediately to stop the sugar from darkening any further.

The results are delicious every single time. Sweetened condensed milk is the perfect base for making a wet caramel. It is basically milk that has had more than half of its water content removed before being sweetened and packed in cans. It is thick, rich, and shelf-stable.

What you make out of condensed milk is dulce de leche. It's often called caramel or toffee, but it's not really either. The recipe is trivial: pour the condensed milk in a pan. Heat it over low heat, stirring continuously, until it turns into dulce de leche.

If too many bits of sugar get stuck to the side of the pan, they will harden and can cause the caramel to seize or become gritty or grainy when you add in the butter and/or the cream. Prevent this by gently swirling the sugar around as it melts, while holding the pan's handle, instead of using a utensil to stir it.

First up, there are two different ways to make caramel. A wet caramel is where the sugar is melted with water then cooked until it caramelizes. And a dry caramel, where the sugar is cooked by itself until it liquefies, then caramelizes. A dry caramel works because sugar is mostly water and heating it will liquefy it.

What is the formula for caramel? ›

The typical formula for caramels is C24H36O18 , so the elements of water have been removed from the sucrose.

To thicken a caramel sauce, use one tablespoon of cornstarch or tapioca starch (sometimes known as tapioca flour) and one tablespoon of water per cup of caramel. Then simmer the caramel, stirring it constantly with a wooden spoon until it becomes thick.

This can happen if sugar crystals form on the sides of the saucepan or if the sugar syrup is mixed too much while cooking. Adjust the Heat: If the caramel cooked at a high heat, causing it to crystallize or burn, lower the heat for future batches.

1) Milk, cream, and condensed milk to help make a lovely light-coloured caramel sauce to drip over your desserts. 2) Golden syrup, sugar, and molasses will provide the sweet taste caramel is best known for. 3) Oil and butter help give your caramel a smoother, softer texture which makes coating things i.e., nuts easier.

Stirring caramel as it cooks isn't necessary—and it can even be detrimental, as it can cause the sugar solution to splash onto the sides of the pan, where the water will evaporate quickly and the sugar can form back into crystals.

Try not to stir it, though you can gently tip the pot to distribute heat and color. 3. Monitor the wet caramelization. Using your eyes and a candy thermometer, check the sugar for color and temperature until it reaches the desired color and temperature.

DO NOT STIR. 5. If you have a lot of sugar on the sides you could brush it down with a wet pastry brush (when the sugar has started melting) but be careful to NOT STIR with it.

You can swirl the pot a little bit, but no stirring. That's so odd to me, because I see people struggling with the dry method yet I've never had a failure with the wet. You just add some water to the sugar, stir it over heat until the sugar is dissolved/melted, then leave it alone until it caramelizes.