Experimenting With Caramel

I have a favorite recipe that calls for a bag of caramels mixed with evaporated milk.  For me, that was a bother - I rarely kept a bag of caramels in my pantry, I hated removing a zillion wrappers and melting the caramels with the milk was always a sticky mess.  Caramel is just sugar, cream and butter, so I wondered how hard it would to make from scratch.  The short answer?  Hard at first, but now I can make it faster than unwrapping and melting those store-bought caramels!

I've played with a few different caramel recipes for the better part three years.  Some use straight sugar, others mix it with water or corn syrup.  I don't keep corn syrup on hand.  I tried the straight sugar recipe (referred to as dry caramel) but it had hard lumps or was crumbly instead of being chewy.  (Yes, I managed to make caramel that wasn't gooey.)  It tasted good, but I was aggravated with the issues.  I tried mixing the sugar with water to make a syrup first (called a wet recipe), but wasn't happy with those results either.  It separated.  It didn't set right.  At least the failures were tasty and paired well with ice cream.

I went back to the dry approach and after a couple more tries I finally got the hang of it.  One of the recipes used a thermometer and indicated that the sugar should initially be cooked until it got up to 300.  But in using the thermometer, I introduced crystals back into the melted sugar, which was the culprit to my crumbly caramel.  I've now stopped using the thermometer for the first step and eyeball the color as to when to add the butter.  Originally I added butter and cream at the same time, but I find it is easier to stir and less likely to crystalize if I add the butter first, then the cream.  Room temperature cream seems to help, too (the butter it seems to be less fussy about).

I cooks up pretty quickly.  The caramel is soft enough to use on these chocolate caramel pretzel bars.  I have tried it in my chocolate caramel brownies (I'm still tinkering with that recipe).  My most recent batch was split up to make some turtles, plain salted caramel wrapped in waxed paper, and a few squares I dipped in chocolate.

This recipe results in a caramel that's soft at room temperature but still holds it shape.  It's fairly hard when refrigerated, which you can bite into, but it will stick to your teeth.

The following is not so much a recipe as a suggestion.  I'm still experimenting with it.  I suspect I should let it get darker before adding the butter but I'm always afraid I'll burn it.  I need to be more daring and let it sit!

Caramel

1 cup sugar
½ cup salted butter (one stick)
½ cup heavy cream, room temperature

Spread sugar evenly on the bottom of a large saucepan and set over medium-high heat.  Swirl around melted sugar rather than stirring it, at least until it's almost all melted.  Once it's brown and melted, stir in butter.  Continue stirring, then when butter is almost melted, add cream.  The cream will bubble up violently.   

 

Continue to stir and heat until it gets to 245-250F.   Take off heat, cool slightly.  

 

If you're making caramels, pour into a 8" square pan lined with parchment paper.  Otherwise, use in whatever recipe you need it in.