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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Know your ingredients: Sugar

I've often wished that I didn't love sugar the way I do. Wouldn't it be so much better if sugar had the nutritional content of raw spinach? But, as usual, reality wags its finger at us dreamers, and we're forced to choose moderation instead. Boo. Hiss.

If any of you read my chocolate post, you may remember that I said sugar was the most difficult ingredient to bake with. That, to put it plainly, is because sugar is finicky. We'll start picking it apart by looking at the different types of sugar.

Types of sugar:

• White sugar: Also called table sugar, cane sugar, granulated sugar, or just plain sugar in recipes, white sugar is crystalline sucrose. Made by refining and filtering sugar cane and (more commonly) sugar beets, this is the go-to sugar for sweetening baked goods, making caramels and candies, creaming cookies, and whipping meringues.
• Superfine sugar: Also called caster (or castor) sugar, superfine sugar is simply a smaller granule of white sugar. It's main benefit is that it dissolves more easily. This makes it undesirable for aeration (creaming, whipping, etc), though. Sometimes superfine sugars contain cornstarch or other additives, something to be mindful of when purchasing and baking with it. You can also make your own using a food processor or spice grinder.
• Powdered sugar: Also called confectioners sugar, 10X sugar, and icing sugar, powdered sugar is most often used to make icings. It is white sugar which has been pulverized into a powder and mixed with a small amount of cornstarch to prevent caking.
• Sanding sugar, coarse sugar, rock sugar, etc: These are sugars left in a very coarse granule, usually used as garnish. Often you see them colored.
• Brown sugar: Both the light and dark variety are made the same way: by adding some molasses (a product of sugar refinery) back into refined white sugar. Brown sugar is more moist and needs to be compacted to be accurately measured by volume. Has a slightly caramelized flavor.
• Raw sugars: This category contains a lot of uncommon sugars such as demerara, muscovado, turbinado, piloncillo, and jaggery. These sugars are partially refined, containing various amounts of molasses. Though they are normally softer than other sugars, there is a lot of variety between the various sugars.

Sugar preparations:

• Boiling: Boiling sugar involves cooking sugar (and usually a bit of water), into a certain temperature, at which point it cools with certain characteristics. These temperatures are generally called stages. Sugar crystals are constantly changing in alignment and structure as they cook, resulting in the different stages of cooked sugar. The lowest temperature at which a change occurs, called thread stage, is 230 degrees F. The next state, soft ball, occurs at 234 degrees F and is used for applications like fudge. The firm ball stage occurs at 244 degrees F and is used for caramels. At 250 degrees F sugar reaches the hard ball stage, at which point it can be used for things like divinity and nougat. Sugar's first crack stage is soft crack, at 270 degrees F. Taffy is sometimes made from sugar at the soft crack stage. At 300 degrees F, sugar is at the hard crack stage, at which point suckers and hard candies are made. Sugar caramelizes at 320 degrees F and burns above 350 degrees. When boiling sugar I find it helpful to grease the sides of the pan, add an acid such as lemon juice to the sugar, and brush down the sides of the pan with water while cooking. The reason for these steps is to ensure proper crystallization, since it only takes one stray crystal to turn an entire batch of sugar. Boiling sugar is why the ingredient gets my award for most finicky. Some of the stages are only four or five degrees off of each other. This means a very accurate thermometer is needed and a very patient and watchful eye. Sugar also tends to make jumps in temperature when it is cooking. It'll hover around 230 for 5 minutes, but then jump up past 250 within 30 seconds. Needless to say, boiling sugar can cause frustration.
• Creaming and whipping: Creaming and whipping both involve incorporating sugar and air into other substances. In the case of creaming, the "other substance" is normally butter. Beating together rough sugar crystals creates friction in the mixer which helps to incorporate and trap air better. The sugar gives the aerated butter stable structure. The same thing goes for cream and egg whites. The structure that sugar gives to the whipped cream or whites helps them to keep aerated for much longer. 

The information for this post comes from CookWise, an amazing book called In the Sweet Kitchen by Regan Daley that everyone should check out, and a small bit from myself.

And that's sugar. If I missed anything, I'm counting on you all to let me know.

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Know your ingredients: Chocolate

This is the first of a planned series of posts about common ingredients.

Chocolate is, with the possible exception of sugar, the hardest ingredient in a bakery to use. Cooking sugar involves a zen-like focus on the thermometer, watching for a one degree rise. Sugar is finicky. One wrong crystal, creeping down the side of the pan, can ruin half an hour's work. But in the end, sugar is sugar. The same cannot be said for chocolate. Chocolate is an unmistakable taste, but not an unmistakable ingredient. Even more frustrating than the variety of products crowding under the umbrella term "chocolate" is that each has a use. If I could satisfy my chocolate curiosities with "use this one, not any of those," I could rest easy. But I couldn't. So to any of you who've ever puzzled over why your ganache didn't turn out, why one brand's bittersweet taste's sweeter than another brand's semisweet, or what exactly a "melty" is, I present my annotated (yes, really) research on chocolate.

A few facts on chocolate

Photo by Hawaiian Vintage Chocolate

• Chocolate, as you probably knew, comes from the cacao bean. As you may have guessed from the colorful pods, cacao beans are grown on trees in tropical climates.  Oddly enough, the pods grow directly on the trunk and main branches, and all the way to the ground. Where most fruits grow high up in the branches, so as not to be eaten by every passing ground-walker, cacao pods are in no such danger due to a tough leathery skin.
• When harvested, the pods are split open, revealing a cavity filled with fresh cacao beans and a white, mucus like substance commonly known as pulp. The beans are then sandwiched between banana leaves on the forest floor and fermented. After this fermentation (a component, I'm coming to realize, of all the great foods), the beans are dried in the sun and shipped to chocolate companies.
• On arrival, chocolate makers roast the beans and crack them open, finally getting a product some of you may have seen: the cocoa nib.

Varieties of Chocolate

Not cocoa nibs

• Cocoa nibs: A cocoa nib is as pure of chocolate as most of us can get (and they can be hard to find). If you've never tasted one, they're very bitter and earthy. Some people do snack on them, or use them in place of chocolate chips in cookies, but it seems cocoa nibs are something of an acquired taste. During the next part of the chocolate making process, cocoa nibs are ground into a paste called either chocolate mass or chocolate liquor (alas, non-alcoholic).
• Chocolate mass: Chocolate mass consists of cocoa solids and cocoa butter. It is doubtful that most of us will ever see or use it in this form, but the taste is very bitter.
• Cocoa butter: Cocoa butter, which makes up 53% of a sample of chocolate mass, is what gives chocolate its melt-in-your-mouth feeling. It's what coats the mouth when a piece of chocolate melts and what gives chocolate its fluidity. It is, like other butters, a fat.
• Cocoa powder: Finally, a form we all recognize. Cocoa powder is chocolate mass with all of the cocoa butter removed. Originally a by-product of chocolate making, it sees widespread use today. Most of you have probably seen a recipe which calls specifically for Dutch-processed cocoa powder. Dutch-processed cocoa powder is more mild in flavor, darker, and doesn't lump as easily because it has been chemically treated to neutralize cocoa's acidity.
• Unsweetened chocolate: Pure hardened chocolate mass. You'll probably see it as "baking chocolate" on recipes. Recipes calling for unsweetened chocolate usually have a pretty intense flavor, so if you're going to substitute a different type of chocolate for it, be sure to decrease the amount of sugar in your recipe.
• Bitter/Semi-sweet/Dark: These are chocolate mass (at least 35%) plus added cocoa butter, sugar, flavorings, and often emulsifiers. Supposedly a bittersweet chocolate contains more chocolate mass than a semisweet (usually by 10% or so), and a dark more than a bittersweet. The problem is, the lines are blurred at best. Bitterness varies vastly by brand and especially by country of origin. A good rule of thumb is to look for a percentage cocoa over a label like "bittersweet." If a recipe calls for semisweet (~65%) or bittersweet(~70%), use whichever you prefer (or whatever you have). It is your kitchen, after all.
• Couverture: Couverture is shiny, fluid chocolate which is great for covering things. It is usually very high quality, and contains at least 32% cocoa butter. Often couverture has only three ingredients (cocoa solids, sugar, and cocoa butter) but it may also contain flavorings and emulsifiers. Couverture comes in all different cocoa percentage ranges.
• Sweet chocolate: This is one I personally have never run across in a recipe. Sweet chocolate is at least 15% chocolate mass, and contains a sweeter, less bitter flavor than semisweet, but ideally contains no milk solids. It is also called German chocolate.
• Milk chocolate: Many people favor milk chocolate for eating. Sometimes I'm one of them. The problem is, it doesn't substitute in place of other baking chocolates well because the milk solids (the only distinguishing factor of milk chocolate) burn easily. It can certainly be melted and substituted in non-baked applications, however.
• Chocolate chips: The main difference in chocolate chips is that they have less cocoa butter, so that the chips retain their shape and give you something hard to bite into in a cookie. Many chocolate chips also contain a lot of added flavors, fats, and emulsifiers, making them unsuitable for chocolate making. Keep in mind as well that in order to melt chocolate chips, you need to add some sort of fat. Cocoa butter would be ideal, but I've yet to meet someone whose pantry staples include cocoa butter. My next choice is butter. Be careful not to add too much, though. You want to keep fat percentage below 40, if you can find what percentage of fat is in your chocolate chips.
• White chocolate: Some people deny white chocolate status in the chocolate family, since the only part of the cacao bean it contains is cocoa butter (in addition to sugar, flavoring, and milk solids). Does it taste like chocolate? No. But it does have a pleasant taste which need not be compared. When substituting it in baked goods, keep in mind that it melts at a lower temperature and burns more easily than dark chocolate.
• Coating chocolate: Coating chocolate is also called compound chocolate, chocolaty coating, and any number of other, trademarked names containing the word "melt." Coating chocolate is used because it is much less expensive that real chocolate, has a higher melting point, and doesn't require tempering. There is a reason, however, that it cannot legally be called chocolate. High in sugar, very low in any part of a cacao bean, and full of hydrogenated oils instead of cocoa butter, you'll know when you bite into it. Coating chocolate has a waxy mouth feel.

Now that we know about all of these types of chocolate, we can talk about tempering. Tempering, in short, is a specific way of melting and cooling chocolate so that the fat crystals all line up in a pleasing arrangement. Tempering is what gives chocolate its shine and its snap. When chocolate has undergone this process, giving it the characteristics we prize in chocolate, it is said to be in temper. This can be hard, but there is an easy solution for most of you. The best way to "temper" chocolate is not to have to temper it at all. When chocolate is made, it's tempered. So when you go to use it, it's still in temper. The easiest thing to do, then, is to melt it without it getting out of temper. Milk and white chocolates go out of temper at about 87 degrees F(dark is closer to 90). To do this, we need to heat the chocolate very slowly. The perfect tool to do this is probably already in your kitchen: the microwave. The idea is to blast the chocolate on medium power in your microwave for about 10 seconds at a time, stirring after each blast. When the chocolate is almost fully melted, stop microwaving and stir until the last pieces dissolve. Then your chocolate is ready to use for any application.

And that, for now, is all I have to say about chocolate. The information mostly comes from the book "On Baking" by Sarah Labensky and company. 

Are there any questions I missed?

What're your chocolate horror stories?

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