Home › Doughnuts › Caramel Sauce
Caramel Sauce
2 cups granulated sugar 5 cups boiling water Melt sugar in deep saucepan and heat, stirring constantly until golden brown; add boiling water. Cook three minutes.
A two-ingredient caramel syrup of the old school: dry-melted sugar let down with water. The proportions are unusually thin, which matters more than anything else here.
- Adding the water is the dangerous momentMolten sugar sits around 340F, far above boiling point. Adding water sets off violent spattering and a burst of steam. Use a deep pan, keep the boiling water at arm's length, pour in a thin stream, and stand back; sugar burns cling to skin.
- Dry caramel, not wetThere is no water in the pan at the start. Sugar melts unevenly, so use a heavy-bottomed pan over medium heat and stir only enough to keep the melted portion moving over the unmelted. Pull it off the heat the moment it is a deep amber; the residual heat will carry it further and burnt caramel is bitter beyond rescue.
- The ratio makes a thin syrupFive cups of water to two of sugar, cooked only three minutes, yields something closer to a pouring sauce or coloring syrup than the thick caramel most cooks expect today. If you want a sauce that clings, it needs long reduction or considerably less water.
- What it was forA thin caramel of this kind was used as much for color and flavoring as for pouring: a spoonful into puddings, custards, gravies or cake batters.
- YieldRoughly five to six cups of syrup. Best kept refrigerated in a sealed jar.
Caramel here means the burnt-sugar syrup that was a working staple of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century kitchen, used to darken gravies, soups, and cakes long before bottled browning sauces were common; commercial caramel coloring is made by a broadly similar heating of sugars. The Royal Cook Book was published by the Royal Baking Powder Company, one of the great promotional cookbooks of the era, distributed cheaply or free to sell leavening, and its recipes tend toward simple, reliable formulas a home cook could not get wrong.