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Caramel Ice Cream
Put half a cup of granulated sugar in a saucepan over the fire, and stir till melted and dark brown. Add half a cup of boiling water and simmer 10 minutes. Make either ice cream you prefer, using only half the sugar given in the recipe. Add enough of this caramel to give the desired flavor and color. Caramel may be added to vanilla or coffee ice cream. Whipped cream may be served with it, or stirred in when the caramel cream is partly frozen.
This is a flavoring syrup rather than a full ice cream recipe: it assumes you already have a custard or cream base on hand, and tells you how to adjust it. The hinge is the sugar arithmetic — the caramel carries sweetness, so the base must be made with half its usual sugar or the finished cream will be cloying and slow to freeze.
- "Over the fire"Medium heat on a modern burner, in a heavy pan with a light-colored interior so you can judge the color. Stainless is easier to read than cast iron or nonstick.
- Dry caramel, stirredSugar melted alone burns quickly at the edges. Keep it moving, and pull the pan the moment it reaches the color of an old penny; residual heat will carry it darker. Past that point it turns acrid and no amount of cream will hide it.
- Adding the waterHalf a cup of boiling water into molten sugar erupts violently and the steam is far hotter than boiling water. Add it in a slow stream at arm's length, with the pan tilted away from you. Use boiling, not cold — cold water seizes the sugar into a lump.
- The ten-minute simmerThat is what dissolves the hardened sugar back into a pourable syrup. Expect roughly half a cup, thickening as it cools; the exact yield depends on how hard it simmers.
- Halving the sugar in the baseSugar also controls texture, not just sweetness, so a base made with half sugar plus caramel syrup ends up in about the right place. A base with full sugar plus caramel will freeze soft and taste flat-sweet.
- How much to addStart with two tablespoons of syrup per quart of base, taste cold, and work up. Flavor reads much weaker when frozen than it does at room temperature.
- Add it coldCool the syrup completely before stirring it into a custard base, and chill the combined mixture thoroughly before churning.
- Whipped cream stirred inFolding whipped cream into the cream when it is partly frozen — soft-serve stage — lightens it considerably. In a modern machine, do this in the last minute or two of churning, or fold it in by hand before the ripening period in the freezer.
- KeepingThe syrup holds for weeks covered in the refrigerator and is worth making in a double batch.
Caramel here means burnt sugar, the older and more literal sense of the word — not the chewy milk-and-butter candy that came to dominate the term in American usage during the twentieth century. Burnt-sugar syrup had a long prior life in Anglo-American cookery as a coloring agent for gravies, soups and dark cakes, sold in bottles as "browning," and its use as an ice cream flavor is an extension of a technique cooks already knew. The instruction to add it to coffee ice cream as well as vanilla shows one syrup serving more than one flavor.