Baking Bouchon - Recipe 37: Caramels

These taste way better than those Kraft caramels and I even like those.  Today I decided that pretty isn't everything.  I like to go back and forth between the theory that pretty matters and that sometimes it doesn't. (In food, people.  I am not having a debate about whether pretty matters in people.  Sheesh, this isn't a real blog about real issues so don't get on my case.)  I've decided that whether pretty matters depends on two things.

1.  How good it tastes.  The better it tastes the less pretty matters.
2.  Who's eating it.  The better I know the people eating it the less pretty matters.  Strangers are way judgier.

So, that's my theory on pretty.  For today, anyway.

So these caramels didn't turn out to be the prettiest things in the world but man, were they tasty.  I always knew that caramels had cream in them - that's what takes the cooked sugar, which would otherwise be hard - like candy - and makes it soft - like caramel.  I didn't know you could substitute different stuff for the cream - like creme fraiche (and technically, a little sour cream because I didn't have enough creme fraiche).  I don't know what it did to the caramels exactly - I guess I'd have to make it with cream and compare it to really know, but I like to think it made an enormous different... mostly because that crap is expensive.

There's actually another weird thing in here -  glucose -  which is a type of sugar that is pretty much like corn syrup (and now I'm wondering if corn syrup would work because again... crap's expensive).  You melt that down and add granulated sugar a little at a time (which is supposed to keep it from crystallizing which it would do if you dumped it all in at once).  That gets cooked until it get crazy hot (350 degrees) and starts to turn brown, aka caramelize.  Once that happens you add butter and then the creme fraiche which had vanilla beans scraped into it.  It bubbles like mad and the temperature drops pretty significantly so you keep cooking it until it reaches 242 degrees which is pretty much soft candy stage.  You would think that all that cooking of sugar and bubbling and craziness would be where I had some drama (because it normally is and I end up burning the sugar and having to start again) but that was not the case this time.

The drama came when I went to pour the hot caramel onto a pan to cool.  Somehow I read the instructions that said to dump it into an 8-inch square pan as dump it onto a sheet tray.  Yeah, that's more than twice the size.  I noticed very quickly that I had screwed up because there was no way the caramels were supposed to be that thin.  So, the next 2 minutes went something like this.  I shouted for help.  CA came running in.  I cursed loudly.  I grabbed a smaller sheet tray.  CA and I attempted to lift the plastic wrap off the large tray and transfer it to the small tray.  The plastic wrap melted out of CA's hands and fell onto the baking sheet.  I grabbed my 8" square pan (not sure why I didn't do that in the first place) and sprayed it with cooking spray (not ideal since the instructions said to line it with plastic wrap).  I scraped the contents of the small sheet tray into the square pan while CA held what was left of the caramel covered plastic.  I finally got all the hot caramel into the square pan.  I apologized for CA for all the drama.  He went back to watching baseball.  I breathed heavily and tried to stop sweating.  Oh yeah - and all of this has nothing to do with why the caramels aren't pretty.

The evidence - which was quickly discarded.

Luckily, after all that business, I got to rest for a little while because the caramel needed to cool before it got cut into individual caramels.

What was also lucky was that the caramels actually came out of the pan after not following the instructions and just spraying the thing with cooking spray.  It came out all in one piece and things were looking relatively promising.

Things still looked promising after I cut the caramels and did I tell you that these things taste so freakin' delicious?  Well, they are!  Plus you can see little vanilla bean specs in them which I just love.  I can't even describe to you how creamy these caramels are.  They're ridiculous.

Unfortunately, they refused to hold their shape.  I put them in a plastic container with cellophane in between them and they pretty much just flattened out and became a mass of caramel again.  I had to take them all back out and re-cut them.  I let them sit out on the counter overnight hoping they'd firm up again which they did, somewhat, but they were still super flat.  Hmmmm.  I'm not sure what happened here.  I either cut them too soon or didn't cook the caramel to quite high enough of a temperature.  I'm thinking maybe the latter because I'm sure they were room temperature when I cut them.  Oh well - these are good enough that they can be ugly.  I forgive them.

Julie