Salted Caramel Addiction

France, as it turns out, is not the most vegetarian-friendly nation on our little blue planet. On honeymoon there last month, Amaury and I often found ourselves scanning the menus at two, three, zut alors, sometimes four restaurants before finding one where I could eat.

Thankfully, crêperies are 1) très commun en France and 2) always have fromage-filled, viande-free options for non-carnivores. We ate crêpes almost every other day! After a savory galette au sarrasin (buckwheat crêpe) washed down with un kir or cidre, we'd turn our attention to the dessert menu. And nearly every time, I found myself ordering un crêpe au caramel beurre salé—a crêpe with homemade salted butter caramel.

(Amaury, by contrast, almost always chose Nutella or some other form of chocolate for his sweet crêpes.)

Brittany is justly famous for its salted caramels, and the other regions of France we visited have helped spread the word. Salty-sweet and sticky-chewy or pourable (hot and saucy?), I couldn't get enough of them. Still can't, though now that we're back home in California, it's harder to feed my addiction.

Chocolate-dipped salted caramels would certainly satisfy, of course. But while delicious, they are rather a lot of work to make. Enter my new favorite cookbook: Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams at Home (if your local bookshop doesn't carry it, try here). It's stocked with recipes for baked rhubarb frozen yogurt, sweet basil and honeyed pine nut ice cream, riesling-poached pear sorbet, and innumerable other unexpected flavors. Best of all—to my mind—is the page on salted caramel ice cream, here called "salty caramel."

Obviously you're going to need an ice cream maker for this one. If you've been thinking about buying one, take my advice and take the plunge. Nothing tops homemade ice cream.

First you're going to want to get your ingredients prepped and ready to go. Don't try to measure the cream, burn the sugar, and read the next step in the recipe all at once. Ain't gonna fly.

In a medium mixing bowl (enough to hold 1 quart of liquid with room to spare), use a fork to mix together 1 1/2 oz. (3 Tbsp) cream cheese and 1/2 tsp salt. This will be easier if you give the cream cheese time to soften up a bit on the counter first.

Measure 1 1/4 cup heavy cream (whipping cream) and stir in 2 Tbsp light corn syrup. 

In another trusty Pyrex cup, measure out 2 cups whole milk. Not skim. Not 2%. Whole milk. 

In a small bowl, use a fork to whisk 2 Tbsp of the milk with 1 Tbsp plus 1 tsp cornstarch.

Put the milk next to the burner you'll be using, and put the cream and cornstarch mixtures on the counter on the opposite side of your chosen burner. Put the cream cheese bowl next to a trivet on the counter. Trust me, this arrangement will make your life easier and potentially avert tragedy.

Now for the fun part: Pour 2/3 cup white sugar in a large stockpot (4 qt.) and give it a shake to evenly distribute it on the bottom of the pan. Turn on the burner to medium heat (slightly lower if your stockpot is a dark metal like the one below). 

Resist the urge to stir until the sugar is amber-colored and melting all around the outsides and only a small circle of white sugar remains in the center. At this point, start stirring with a heatproof spatula, pushing the melted sugar towards its solid brethren in the middle. Keep at it until all that sucrose is a beautiful copper brown and starting to bubble and pop.

Remove from heat and caaaarefulllly pour in a bit of the cream, about 1/4 cup. It's gonna sizzle like crazy—picture how baking soda and vinegar react, only imagine the vinegar is boiling hot—so don't put your face over the pan! Stir well as you slowly pour in the rest of the cream a bit at a time. 

Put the pot back on the burner and add the milk. Bump the heat up to medium high and bring it to a roiling boil. As soon as it starts to bubble, set the timer for 4 minutes. Now, the eponymous Jeni of this cookbook doesn't say to stir at this step, but she doesn't specify not to either, so I give it a whirl every minute or so just to be safe.

When the timer goes "Ding!", move the pot off the burner again and stir in the milk/cornstarch mix. Return to heat and cook for another minute.

This next step is easiest if you have a kitchen helper but can be done all by your lonesome. Slowly pour the caramel mixture into the bowl with the cream cheese, whisking as you do so. If you're on your own, alternate whisking and pouring.

Add 2 tsp pure vanilla extract—none of that cheap imitation crap–and put the bowl in the fridge until cold. If you're feeling impatient, nestle the bowl inside a larger bowl full of ice.

Fire up your ice cream maker, pour the cold ice cream mixture into the pre-frozen canister, and let it run just until the sides begin to freeze (about 25 minutes in my machine). If there are clumps of caramel or cream cheese in your mixture, strain it through a sieve as you pour it into the machine. When it's ready, scoop the ice cream into a container and allow to freeze for several hours before serving. Makes 1 quart.

Oh, and do your dishes.

Printable recipe behind the cut...

Salt, Caramel, Chocolate

One of the good things about being a chocoholic is that you've always got something in which to drown your sorrows, something to give a bit of comfort when life gets you down. The better the chocolate, the better the mood upswing (though I learned at an early age that one should always keep a bag of chocolate chips in the freezer for emergencies).

I've been trying to juggle too many eggs recently, but indulging in some homemade chocolate cake, chocolate almond bars, or hot cocoa always manages to simultaneously calm me down and lift up my spirits a bit.

Given all this, I felt it was time to share a particularly exciting chocolate recipe I've had in the pipeline for awhile now.

Chocolate. Dipped. Salted. Caramels.

Take a moment to wipe that drool off your keyboard and keep reading.

Now, this probably isn't the best recipe to attempt when you're juggling eggs, but if you've got a weekend afternoon to burn, the results are more than worth the effort.

Don't be scared away if you've never made candy before. I'm not going to go into the intricacies here… these posts already tend toward the long side, and I'm a novice candy maker anyway. I do suggest you crack open Joy of Cooking or another solid cookbook and read the intro section on candy making first. You might also consider starting out with a half batch.

The first thing to do is gather your weaponry:

(As always, click on the image for a larger version)

Rainbow spoons

(Note: these items are just for the caramels; the chocolate dipping part will actually come in a separate post.)

Put your recipe up somewhere visible. Yes, I like to tape mine to the microwave. If you're making a half-recipe (a good idea if this is your first foray into the world of candy making), write out the conversions. Oh, sure, you may think you'll remember to add just one cup of sugar instead of two… but speaking from experience, it's best to err on the side of caution here.

As you stir, it'll go from looking like this smooth concoction:

…to this bubbling brew:

…to this vat of golden, sugary goodness:

You need to stir continuously until it comes to a boil, but after that, just stir occasionally and dick around with your camera in the meantime.

Reminds me rather strongly of the mudpots at Yellowstone...

When your candy thermometer starts getting close to 257˚F, keep a close eye on it and start testing to see if you're at the hard ball stage yet. You may want several small dishes of cold water handy for this.

The gist of the water test is that, as a sugar mixture cooks, the water evaporates (this is not rocket science). Mixtures with higher concentrations of sugar react differently in water, with the chilled product becoming harder and less flexible.

At the hard ball stage, a small amount of sugar syrup dribbled into cold water from a clean, dry spoon (wooden or silicone, not metal) and quickly picked up forms a relatively rigid ball. If it's only at the firm ball stage—about 244˚-248˚F, at which the cooled syrup forms an easily squishable ball—it needs to be cooked longer.

Water test aftermath

Time for a public safety announcement: sugar syrup is really hot. It hurts somewhere between the dickens and the blazes if you get it on your skin, so please be careful. If you do have an incident, immediately submerge your singed bits in ice water and slather on some aloe.

Now, you don't want to undercook your caramel. I made that mistake the first time, and while the end products were a delightful combination of chewy and melt-in-your-mouth, they oozed back together after a few days in a storage tub to become an unmanageably large block of candy.

But neither do you want to overcook it, or you'll wear out your jaw trying to chew the damn things. It's a delicate balance.

Once your goopy, syrupy mixture hits a perfect 257˚F or hard ball stage, add the remaining ingredients and pour it all into your prepped pan. Let it cool for a few hours.

Don't skimp on the foil here

Eventually it'll be cool enough to dump out onto your cutting board and slice up into logs. Score a line down the center to mark it into halves, then quarters, then eighths. Then you can actually cut through the block.

Your knife is gonna get über greasy here. I found it worked best to keep my right hand on the handle (and away from anything oily) and my left hand on top of the blade (watch those fingers), and to use a rocking motion to push the knife through the caramel, rather than trying to saw through.

I dunno what's up with those speckly ends

Caramel bokeh

Each caramel strip will yield about 10 pieces, so technically you'll end up with about 80 caramels… though I found a few of mine somehow disappeared along the way. Funny how that always happens when I bake.

For dipping the candies, you can temper the chocolate to give it a sinfully smooth and shiny luster (more on that soon), or just dunk 'em in a bowl of microwaved melted chocolate. Sprinkle on some fancy salt after they've cooled a bit but are still sticky.

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Salted Chocolate-Dipped Caramels
Adapted slightly from the New York Times T Magazine

Ingredients
1 1/3 cups heavy cream (also called heavy whipping cream)
2 cups white sugar
1/2 cup light corn syrup
1/3 cup honey (buy local to avoid lead contamination!)
6 Tbsp unsalted butter, cut into ~1/2" cubes
1 tsp vanilla extract (the real deal, not imitation)
2 tsp sea salt
~1 tsp fleur de sel, pink salt, orange salt, black salt, the coolest salt you can find
1 1/2 lbs bittersweet chocolate, finely chopped (you can experiment with other types of chocolate if you like)
Vegetable oil

1.   Generously line an 8x8" pan with foil and grease it up with veggie oil.

2.   Prep the rest of your ingredients and have them easily accessible.

3.   Get out your biggest saucepan—4 quarts will do the trick nicely—and bring the cream to a boil.

4. Pour in the sugar, corn syrup, and honey. Stir, stir, stir with a clean, dry wooden spoon until the mixture comes to a rolling boil.

5. Let boil, stirring occasionally, for somewhere between 15 and 30 minutes. Keep an eye on your candy thermometer (keep it in the pan the whole time to get accurate, instant readings); when it gets close to 257˚F,  watch it, hawklike, and test to see if it's at the hard ball stage. Candy can hover for seemingly forever at one temperature before suddenly sending the mercury rocketing up, so focus.

6. As soon as it hits 257˚F or the hard ball stage, remove from heat and stir in the butter, vanilla, and sea salt. It's a good idea to wear oven mitts when you're doing this to protect against 257˚F sugar splashes.

7. When the butter has melted, pour the mixture into your greased, foil-lined pan and let it cool and solidify. If you're not going to dip the candies in chocolate (WTF is wrong with you?), sprinkle the block with your fancy salt when it's partially solid but still sticky enough to hold the grains.

8. Once it's at room temp, turn that pan upside-down to put the caramel on a cutting board. Carefully peel off the foil (wash it and reuse it!), then invert the candy block again. I'm not sure if that second inversion is reallllly necessary, but it's in the original recipe, so let's just go with it.

9. With a heavy-duty knife, score 1" thick sections in the caramel, then cut through with a rocking motion to create eight 1" logs, strips, whatever.

10. Cut each caramel log into 1" pieces (the original recipe calls for 1/2" thick pieces, but I liked the larger, square candies better).

11. Melt the chocolate in the microwave or a double boiler. Use a large fork or tongs to dip each caramel in the chocolate. Let them drip on a baking rack set over plenty of scrap paper. Sprinkle with salt after every 8-10 caramels (you don't want to salt them too soon or the grains will melt into the chocolate), and transfer the pieces to parchment paper to fully dry.