Home › Frozen Desserts › Caramel
Caramel
Melt one cup of sugar with one tablespoon of water in a frying pan. Stir till it becomes a dark brown color, but don't burn it. Add one cup of boiling water; simmer ten minutes and cool.
This is a caramel syrup — burnt-sugar flavoring to be stirred into ice creams, mousses and sauces rather than eaten on its own. The whole recipe hinges on how far you take the color before the water goes in.
- The moment that mattersPull the sugar from the heat as soon as it reaches the color of an old penny; the recipe gives no temperature, and a candy thermometer would read somewhere in the 350s F at that stage. Caramel carries enough residual heat to darken further off the burner, and past that point it turns acrid rather than deep.
- Adding the boiling waterA cup of water hitting molten sugar erupts in steam and spatters. Take the pan off the heat, pour the water down the side in a slow stream, and stand back with a long-handled spoon. The water must be boiling — cold water seizes the caramel into a solid lump.
- Pan choiceThe "frying pan" of the period would have been heavy cast iron or steel. Use any heavy-bottomed saucepan with a light-colored interior if you have one, so you can judge the color; a black pan makes it nearly impossible to see.
- StirringModern practice is to swirl rather than stir once the sugar has liquefied, which keeps crystals from being dragged up the sides. With only a tablespoon of water the sugar essentially dry-caramelizes, so gentle stirring early on to break up dry patches is reasonable.
- The ten-minute simmerChiefly this dissolves the hardened caramel back into a pourable syrup, and it concentrates the syrup as water boils off. Simmer until no shards remain on the pan bottom.
- Yield and keepingRoughly a cup or a little more of thin dark syrup, depending on how hard it simmers. It keeps for months in a sealed jar in the refrigerator; if it stiffens, warm it briefly.
- How much to useThe book gives no proportion. Start with three to four tablespoons per quart of ice cream base or custard, tasting as you go.
Burnt-sugar syrup was a workhorse of the late nineteenth-century kitchen, kept in a bottle and used for two quite different jobs: flavoring frozen desserts and puddings, and darkening soups, gravies and brown sauces before commercial gravy browning was widely sold. The word itself came into English from French caramel, generally traced back through Spanish to a Latin term for sugar cane; in nineteenth-century American cookbooks the term is used loosely for anything from this syrup to the chewy candy. What the recipe assumes, and does not say, is that the cook already knows what a properly caramelized sugar smells like \— a judgment passed down by watching rather than by writing.