Home › A Group of Foreign Soups › Caramel--or Burnt Sugar
Caramel--or Burnt Sugar
For Sauces and Soups Put a quarter of a pound of finely sifted sugar into a porcelain-lined saucepan, and place over a moderate fire. Stir continuously with a wooden spoon until it is of a dark brown color; then add 1 pint of cold water. Draw it to one side and let simmer for a quarter of an hour. Strain, and bottle for use. If the fire is too hot, the caramel will be discolored. A few drops added to sauces or soups will give the desired color.
A single-ingredient kitchen staple: sugar cooked past sweetness and dissolved in water to make a colouring liquid. The whole difficulty is judging the colour before it turns acrid, and getting the water in without being burned.
- QuantitiesA quarter pound of sugar is about half a cup (115 g); a pint is two cups. "Finely sifted sugar" means superfine or caster sugar, which melts more evenly than coarse granulated, though ordinary granulated works.
- The heatA "moderate fire" means moderate rather than fierce heat. The warning about too hot a fire is real: sugar scorched hard goes acrid and throws bitter black specks rather than a clean dark liquid.
- Colour, not sweetnessYou are taking the sugar well past the amber stage used for candy, to the point where it smokes faintly and smells sharp — roughly 375-390F if you are checking with a thermometer. It should look like strong coffee. Stopping at golden gives a syrup that sweetens without colouring.
- Adding the waterThis is the hinge. Cold water hitting sugar at nearly 400F erupts in steam and molten spatter. Take the pan off the heat first, use boiling or very hot water, pour it down the side of the pan a little at a time with a long-handled spoon, and keep your face and forearms clear.
- The pan"Porcelain-lined" means enamelled cast iron or steel. Any heavy pan with a light-coloured interior serves, since you need to read the colour of the sugar; a black or dark nonstick pan makes that guesswork.
- The quarter-hour simmerNot a cooking time so much as a dissolving time. The sugar seizes into hard lumps when the water goes in, and gentle simmering melts them back down into the liquid.
- Yield and keepingExpect somewhat less than the pint of water you started with. Bottle it and keep it refrigerated, and discard it if it grows cloudy or shows any surface growth.
- UseDrops, not spoonfuls, as the recipe says; past that the bitterness starts to read on the palate. Add it at the end, off the heat, and judge by eye.
Nineteenth-century kitchens kept a bottle of "browning" for the reason restaurant kitchens still do: pale gravy and thin stock look underdone, however well they taste. Some household versions were compounded with spices, onion or beer. Burnt sugar let down with water is also the basis of the browning sauce used in Caribbean cooking for stewed chicken and oxtail. The same substance is now produced industrially as caramel colour, designated E150, and is among the most heavily used colourings in the world food supply.