The Cook’s Kitchen

I love salt and sweet together, and caramel is one of my favorite things in the world, so I wanted to mix the two worlds, and I made some fleur de sel caramels.

I got a basic recipe from Gourmet and then changed it a bit. The original recipe called for white sugar and unsalted butter; I used turbinado sugar and French style butter (richer than typical American butter, though still unsalted). I also added the fleur de sel, as well as a teaspoon of good vanilla.

The recipe is simple:

• 5 tablespoons of unsalted butter, in chunks
• 1 cup heavy cream
• 1 teaspoon sea salt (you can use about any of the cool salts available; some will give slightly different flavors)
• 1 1/2 cups turbinado or cane sugar
• 1/4 cup water
• 1/4 cup light corn syrup
• 1 teaspoon vanilla

The butter and cream need to be mixed, and the salt needs to be dissolved, so I put them together in a saucepan and heated just to a simmer, until the salt was dissolved and the butter incorporated/melted. I set that aside and put the sugar, corn syrup and water in a larger saucepan (I used a 4 quart, just to just sure the mixture never overflowed… that’s a bad thing with hot sugar!). Over medium high heat, I stirred the sugar/water/syrup mixture just enough to get it even, then let it sit, stirring only now and then, until the sugar was dissolved. At that point, I screwed up…

I was on the phone while doing this, and also watching my new kitten, Bucky McKatt, attack everything in sight, and I missed a crucial step here. I took the sugar solution off the heat and added the cream/butter/salt mixture to it, stirring it together. I used a candy thermometer then and heated everything up together, stirring frequently until reaching 250 degrees F. I took the caramel off the heat and poured it into a parchment lined square baking dish to let it cool.

What did I miss? I forgot to let the sugar cook!!! So I ended up with a very sweet, somewhat caramel tasting goop. Don’t get me wrong here, it’s actually good stuff, and will go with fruit or ice cream just swell. But I would have had to pour it into people’s hands to try it as caramels! Not good for office consumption!

So I tried again, this time actually doubling the recipe. The one problem with using turbinado sugar is the color. With white sugar, it’s very obvious when the sugar is browned to the desired degree. Lighter cane sugar would be easier, too. Turbninado sugar, though, is already brown, so I had to be careful and use my nose to tell me when it was just before the burn.

With double the amount of liquid, it took longer to get to 250 degrees F. I actually took it to 252 to make the caramels a bit more solid. For softer, keeping it down at 247/248 would help, too. Right after taking the caramel off the heat, I added the vanilla and stirred it in, and then I poured the caramel into the same parchment lined pan I used in my failed attempt and waited.

It only took about 2 1/2 hours for the caramel to firm up, so I used a pizza blade I have that’s 14″ long to cut the caramels. I cut them into approximately 1″ squares, giving me 64 caramels (the pan was an 8″ square pan).After making all the little caramels from the one big caramel, I started trying to put a bit of fleur de sel on each individual caramel, but it wasn’t sticking. With the aforementioned kitten, I keep spray bottles handy, and got the bright idea of lightly sprizing the caramels, then adding the salt… Worked like a charm!

I cut wax paper squares of about 4″ or so, then individually wrapped the caramels. This took about as long as anything, but it wasn’t tough at all. The result was a heap o’ caramelly goodness! My first bite proved that they came out just about perfect! And they were easy to make, with few ingredients, and the fanciest tool needed was a $3 candy thermometer.

When heating up melted sugar, it’s very dangerous. Don’t have kids messing around or anything that could tip the pan over. Burns can be really nasty with this sort of stuff!