Caramel Sauce 101

When I first started baking, I made the classic rookie mistake of "winging it." For those of you unfamiliar, 'winging it' is the act of baking without any sort of recipe or ratio, and is usually the result of laziness. My first experience with its disastrous consequences came about after I decided that I knew the ingredients in caramel sauce, and thus could make it without any guides. After covering my delicately prepared dessert in rock-hard amber liquid instead of the gooey, creamy sauce I had envisioned, I hung my head in shame.

Since that fateful day, I've always doggedly followed recipes for caramel. As should you. But wouldn't it be better to know the proportions (as we do for ganache) for each type of caramel? I think so. So I put together a little test using heavy cream, milk, yogurt, water, and butter as additions to the initial sugar. And I made sure to write them careful down, so as to share them with you lovely people.

All ratios assume that the weight of sugar used equals 100%. To make the caramel sauce, I cooked sugar with a splash of water and cream of tartar in a saucepan until they reached an amber color, then whisked in the test ingredient.

Test Caramels:

• Caramel #1 - 50% water: This caramel was bland and not at all creamy. It kept its shape fairly well (only minimal spreading at first) and didn't harden. For this reason, I chose not to test with a higher than 50% water content.
• Caramel #2 - 50% milk: This caramel was not creamy either, but contained burnt milk solids. It wasn't as bland as Caramel #1 and spread was roughly the same.
• Caramel #3 - 50% heavy cream: This caramel was fairly creamy, thick, and stayed fairly soft. It was gooey, and stuck to a spoon even upside down.
• Caramel #4 - 50% butter: The butter melted but would not mix fully into this caramel. The result was a very hard sugar with a thick layer of grease on top.
• Caramel #5 - 100% cream: This caramel was smooth and creamy, but stayed very soft and was not at all gooey.
• Caramel #6 - 50% yogurt: This caramel had lots of burnt milk solids, was grainy, slightly gooey, and had an odd, sour taste.
• Caramel #7 - 20% butter: This caramel was just as hard as #4, but without excess butter sitting on top.
• Caramel #8 - 30% cream: This caramel was hard, though not quite as hard as #4 or #7.

Conclusion:

Caramel #4, made with 50% heavy cream, was by far the best sauce of the group and heavy cream was the only additional ingredient which really worked. The caramel with 30% heavy cream ended up too hard, and the caramel with 100% heavy cream was very soft and runny. For a thick, gooey caramel, 40-50% is as little heavy cream as you should use. That will produce a nice thick and gooey caramel which will probably be fairly sticky. As you climb the scale toward 100%, a progressively thinner and runnier caramel will form. Over 100%, the caramel would be close to water in viscosity. This tells me that caramel needs both enough fat and water to create both softness and creamy-ness without burning or excluding the fat.

I hope everyone else found this experiment as beneficial as I did. Enjoy your caramel making, everyone!

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