Homemade Caramel Sauce Recipe (2024)

FAQs

How is caramel sauce made from scratch? ›

You'll add sugar and water to a heavy bottomed saucepan, allow it to dissolve and gently bubble for about 9 minutes until it caramelizes and turns a beautiful amber color. Then butter, cream, vanilla, and salt get blended in. The mixture is set aside to cool and then poured into a glass jar to cool completely.

The main ingredient for making a caramel is sugar. A liquid caramel can be made using any quantity of sugar or water just as long as it follows the ratio of 2 parts sugar: 1 part water.

Absolutely! You can use any milk you have at home, whether whole, non-dairy, or evaporated, to make a deliciously creamy caramel sauce.

Swirl, don't stir: While slow, deliberate stirring will help the sugar dissolve evenly, you want to stop stirring once it has fully melted.

Essentially both methods are heating sugar, then adding fat (butter and cream, typically); but the wet uses water to dissolve the sugar faster. The drawback with wet caramel is that it can easily crystallize on the sides of the pan, which is disastrous for your caramel. The method I prefer is the dry method.

Ok you may not have known this but, ~newsflash~ caramel is literally just cooked sugar with a little bit of butter (for stability) and heavy cream (for flavor & mouthfeel) stirred in at the end. The longest (and “hardest”) part of making caramel is just toasting and melting down the sugar at the very beginning.

Explanation: The typical formula for caramels is C24H36O18 , so the elements of water have been removed from the sucrose.

Caramel is, simply, burned sugar. We want to let it melt, darken to an amber color and take on a deep and bittersweet flavor. The best, most flavorful caramel starts with this step. You can caramelize sugar two ways— with the dry method or wet method.

To make a perfect easy caramel every-time, simply add one or two drops of vinegar and just enough water to wet the sugar. The idea is to lower the PH. you can also use a small pinch of citric acid or cream of tartar if you have.

Place the milk over the boiling water in the double boiler and cover with a lid. Bring it to a simmer over medium heat. Stirring occasionally, simmer for one-and-a-half to two hours, until the milk becomes thick and reaches the desired caramel color.

Is caramel just heated condensed milk? ›

In this recipe, sweetened condensed milk is cooked until it creates a deliciously rich caramel sauce! The best part is this recipe has ONE ingredient! Just one!

When you add heat to your ingredients, they undergo a chemical reaction known as the “Maillard reaction.” This means that the sugar is cooked to the proper moisture level and caramelization occurs. You know when this happens as the mixture changes colour to a rich brown.

This is usually caused by sugar crystals stuck to the side of the pan that didn't get fully dissolved. It only takes one to set off a chain reaction, and before you know it you have crunchy caramel.

Too short of a cooling time: Caramel sauce thickens significantly as it cools, so let the caramel cool for the appropriate time to achieve the right thickness. If the sauce is still too thin after cooling completely, place it back on the stovetop and reheat it on low heat for a few additional minutes.

It's thought the most basic form of caramel was first made by the Arabs around 1,000 AD by mixing sugar and water to form a crystallised liquid, that they used initially in the beauty industry, (think waxing and sugaring) and later becoming a confection which they first called simply a “ball of sweet.”

If the temperature gets too hot and the caramel becomes too hard as it cools, you can put it back in the pan with a couple of tablespoons of cold water to try and save it.