Caramel: good. Especially "salt-caramel." Especially salt-caramel from France. Particulièrement salt-caramel from France that someone apparently found reasonably priced at $18.99 for a box the size of a cassette tape. Must be something about the exchange rate and our strained relations with the French. Anyway, after thoughtlessly wolfing several of them, I noticed the price tag and tried to savor what I could remember of the flavors that had just cost me more than an oil-change. Then I became inspired, either to beat the caramel con-men (femmes?) at their own game by underselling them, or at least to make some pale replica that would tide me over until we could pawn some jewelry and locate another couple nineteen-dollar boxes.
After skimming a half-dozen internet recipes that called for evaporated milk and corn syrup, both of which seem sort of gross (and perhaps more importantly, neither of which we had on hand), I made up my own recipe based on what we did have on hand, namely sugar (yes, also sort of gross—we seldom use white sugar so the bag we had was probably from our Y2K stash), half-and-half, and butter.
The process I made up was, unsurprisingly, simple: step one dump it all in, step two stir it, step three wait forever, step four don't take it off the heat for even a second because it will crystallize into a freaky mess of what seems like wet sand, step five go back to step one and start over paying particular attention to step four, etc. So finally, after you do all that, you get this (astute readers may notice my secret adulterants arrayed on the stove—the French stuff included pineau des Charentes, after all), and then you pour it in a pan and let it cool.
The hot goop eventually cooled in its pan. It is very sticky and gooey and sort of self-heals if you scoop a blob out of it. Tastes pretty good with a little kosher salt. But the underlying milk/butterfat flavor is unappealing to me. And it is definitely not stiff enough. Anyway, I have now fulfilled my craving/interest for high-dollar caramel. I only ate a few "pieces" (spoonfuls), but I never want to eat any more of it again.
Posted by Charles on April 6, 2004 10:39 PM