Homemade Caramel Sauce Recipe (2024)

FAQs

How is caramel sauce made from scratch? ›

You'll add sugar and water to a heavy bottomed saucepan, allow it to dissolve and gently bubble for about 9 minutes until it caramelizes and turns a beautiful amber color. Then butter, cream, vanilla, and salt get blended in. The mixture is set aside to cool and then poured into a glass jar to cool completely.

Absolutely! You can use any milk you have at home, whether whole, non-dairy, or evaporated, to make a deliciously creamy caramel sauce.

Swirl, don't stir: While slow, deliberate stirring will help the sugar dissolve evenly, you want to stop stirring once it has fully melted.

The main ingredient for making a caramel is sugar. A liquid caramel can be made using any quantity of sugar or water just as long as it follows the ratio of 2 parts sugar: 1 part water.

Essentially both methods are heating sugar, then adding fat (butter and cream, typically); but the wet uses water to dissolve the sugar faster. The drawback with wet caramel is that it can easily crystallize on the sides of the pan, which is disastrous for your caramel. The method I prefer is the dry method.

Too short of a cooling time: Caramel sauce thickens significantly as it cools, so let the caramel cool for the appropriate time to achieve the right thickness. If the sauce is still too thin after cooling completely, place it back on the stovetop and reheat it on low heat for a few additional minutes.

Place the milk over the boiling water in the double boiler and cover with a lid. Bring it to a simmer over medium heat. Stirring occasionally, simmer for one-and-a-half to two hours, until the milk becomes thick and reaches the desired caramel color.

Basic caramel has sugar, milk, and butter in it, and is then brought up to a high temperature until it all thickens up. By starting with condensed milk, we already have milk and sugar combined and it is already partially thickened, so caramel is made more quickly.

The water evaporates, leaving sugar crystals behind. If even one sugar crystal falls back into the pan of cooking caramel, it starts a chain reaction of sugar crystals and the entire pan will harden. The result? Gross, grainy caramel that is unusable in most recipes.

Is caramel just boiled sugar? ›

Ok you may not have known this but, ~newsflash~ caramel is literally just cooked sugar with a little bit of butter (for stability) and heavy cream (for flavor & mouthfeel) stirred in at the end. The longest (and “hardest”) part of making caramel is just toasting and melting down the sugar at the very beginning.

Explanation: The typical formula for caramels is C24H36O18 , so the elements of water have been removed from the sucrose.

This wee amount of acid prevents any crystallization—from subtle graininess to total disasters. In other words, it leads you toward the smoothest, shiniest, silkiest caramel sauce.

You see, we want the caramel to be smooth and silky. If crystallization occurs, the sauce can be grainy or worse — unusable! Lemon juice is our little failsafe to prevent crystallization.

The main ingredient in caramel is sugar. However, depending on the recipe you use, you may have to incorporate butter, heavy cream, water, or corn syrup as additional ingredients. High-quality, real caramel is always made with three basic ingredients and those are sugar, heavy cream, and butter.

Organic caramel specialties are obtained by the controlled heat treatment of food sugars with one or multiple ingredients that give a distinctive taste and/or special texture to the final product. The added ingredients can include milk, cream, butter, salted butter, fruit extracts, honey, malt, chocolate, etc.