I love caramel. I love chocolate, too, but given the choice between a good caramel dessert or a chocolate dessert, for your own safety, it's best not to get between me and the caramel.
Caramel is great for putting inside of chocolate; that's the best of both worlds, like that Hershey's classic Rolos. Oh! Remember the original Marathon Bars? Caramel is good over, and in, ice cream and cookies, and for coating apples, pears, creme brulee, pies, popcorn and girl friends! wooHOO!
Have you tried Häagen-Dazs' Dulce de Leche ice cream? Oh. My. Divine. It has these lovely ribbons of caramel running through it. Highly recommended.
Well, I've been cooking more and more lately. Tonight, in search of a little comfort food and some mental distraction, I decided to try my hand at caramel-making. How hard could it be? Boil some water with sugar in it, add some butter and milk and presto-change-o! Caramel Candy. Right?
Um. Not so much.
This moment, in my kitchen is a testament to my cooking naivete: a baking dish full of caramel-colored sugar crystals. Tastes like caramel; looks, and feels, a lot like brown sugar. I think I'll use it to sweeten my coffee.
Turns out it is difficult to make candy. Well, not difficult, really. More like delicate or finicky; tricky, mostly. Melted sugar doesn't like to be melted. It wants very much to be a crystal. It likes being crystallized. If you're sugar, crystals = normal, pleasant and stable; melted = a highly agitated, unstable, abnormal, uncomfortable condition. Kind of like the first time you thought about your folks having sex, but worse. Yikes!
Plus, as it turns out, there are any number of fairly innocuous things that you can do during the cooking to speed sugar's return to it's preferred state. While making my "caramel" tonight, I think I did, well, pretty much all of them!
Tonight I learned some interesting things about the chemistry and nature of melted sugar -- after I created my batch of caramel crystals. After the disaster, I went to Google, looking for things like: "making caramel candy not crystals," "how do I prevent crystals while making caramel candy," and "where did I do wrong" (that one didn't find me any good hits about caramel). Eventually, I hit on a couple of sites that were very informative. I love the Internet. It's like caramel for your brain!
As I said, I'm pretty sure that everything you're not supposed to do to prevent the dreaded crystallization, I did. I stirred it after it was boiling - a lot. I bumped the pan. I jostled it. I didn't use a wooded spoon. I overheated it by a degree or so. I didn't use enough "inhibitor". I added cold ingredients into the syrup. I refrigerated it when it was done. I didn't fully dissolve the sugar before it boiled and, last, and probably most heinous, I didn't keep the sugar crystals from forming on the sides of the pan while it was cooking. Oh, did I mention that I stirred it? A lot? That's supposed to be very bad, too.
Oh, I did do one thing right: I used a candy thermometer. Big whoop. Lotta good it did me... ;-)
So, I'll eventually try it again. Maybe this weekend. In the mean time, I just had to talk about this. I was so thrilled at the actual making of the caramel, the process. I was kind of proud of myself. Look at me! I'm COOKING for cryin' out loud!
And then result was so so disappointing, and so very much not caramel as I know and love it. It was pretty funny, really. Kind of a caramel roller coaster that careened out of control, crashing crazily into candy sand! (how much did that suck???)
Stay tuned. I'll let you know how the next batch turns out.
Btw, if you want me to send you links to the sites that I found for making candy and caramel and such, drop me a comment (below). I'll send them along.
Actually, I just want to see if anyone's reading this thing ;-).
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