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Chocolate Caramel Syrup
Melt 2 squares bitter chocolate over hot water. In a saucepan put 3/4 cup sugar and 1/4 cup water, and cook until it forms a dark brown syrup. Add 1/2 cup boiling water and cook until thick. Add slowly to the melted chocolate and stir until smooth.
A two-part sauce: a dark caramel loosened with water, then folded into melted unsweetened chocolate. The whole thing takes about fifteen minutes, and the only difficult moment is judging the caramel.
- Bitter chocolate"Squares" of bitter chocolate are the 1-ounce blocks of unsweetened baking chocolate, so 2 squares is 2 oz. Unsweetened is what the recipe wants; substituting semisweet or a bar of dark eating chocolate will make the syrup cloying, since all the sugar here comes from the caramel.
- Melt over hot water, not in itSet the bowl over barely simmering water and keep the bottom clear of the surface. A drop of condensed steam is enough to make unsweetened chocolate seize into a grainy paste, and the recipe gives you no fat or liquid to bring it back.
- Judging the caramelThe recipe gives you a colour cue and nothing else: "a dark brown syrup" is caramel past amber and just short of acrid, somewhere in the region of 340-360F if you want to check it with a candy thermometer. Swirl the pan rather than stirring once the sugar has dissolved, and pull it from the heat a shade lighter than you want, since it keeps darkening in the hot pan.
- The boiling water is the hazardAdding 1/2 cup water to caramel at that temperature produces a violent burst of steam and spitting sugar. Use a saucepan considerably larger than the volume suggests, have the water already at a boil, and pour it down the side of the pan with your hand out of the way.
- "Cook until thick"Two or three minutes of simmering after the water goes in is enough to redissolve any hardened caramel and reduce it slightly. Overshoot and it will set to a chew when it cools; the syrup should look thin in the pan and thicken as it comes to room temperature.
- CombiningAdd the hot caramel to the chocolate in a slow stream, stirring the whole time. Dumping it in at once can shock the cocoa butter out of suspension and leave the sauce oily and separated.
- Yield and keepingAbout 1 cup, enough to sauce six to eight servings of ice cream, or to stir into hot or cold milk a couple of tablespoons at a time. Refrigerated in a jar it keeps a few weeks and stiffens considerably; warm it over hot water before using.
This belongs to the era when a hostess might keep a jar of chocolate syrup on hand for sodas, sundaes and hot chocolate rather than buying it bottled; the drugstore soda fountain was at its height in the decades around the 1920s. The caramel step is what distinguishes it from plain cocoa-and-sugar syrups: burning the sugar first adds a faintly bitter, toasted note that flatters unsweetened chocolate, which on its own can taste harsh and chalky.