Homemade Salted Caramel Sauce
This Salted Caramel recipe is about as easy as caramel sauce gets! It only uses 5 ingredients, and it’s perfect for topping ice cream, brownies or any other desserts you want to add it too like my Salted Caramel Apple Pie. This recipe is from Bobby Flay It is an easy no-fail recipe made with granulated sugar, water, heavy cream, unsalted butter, and of-course salt. Homemade caramel sauce is not as hard as people make it out to be and I can’t wait for you to try this recipe to see for yourself. It’s liquid gold - buttery smooth and sweet.
Caramel sauce is easily bought at the store but it is so much better homemade. There are several ways to make homemade caramel sauce. There are dry and wet methods of making it. The wet method combines water and sugar in the first step, and the dry method uses just sugar. When using just sugar, you heat the sugar and allow it to melt before proceeding with adding the butter and cream. It can be a trickier process, sometimes leading to burning the sugar which causes a bitter tasting caramel sauce (if the sugar cooks for too long) and can seize up when you add the butter and sugar. The wet method is way more straight forward and a little harder to mess up. My kind of recipe. That is the method I use in this recipe.
Some tips to making homemade caramel sauce
- Have ingredients measured out and ready to add in so caramel doesn’t burn in the meantime while measuring. (Don’t turn your back on it or walk away once you start)
- Add the cream slowly to the sugar mixture so it’s doesn’t splash and burn you.
- There is a prime stage with caramel sauce, if you take it off too early, it will be lacking in flavor (it also won’t be as thick), but if you leave it on just a few seconds too long it’s can burn and become bitter
- So pay really close attention to the shade of the caramel. (Watch the video to see the colour) A rich but not super dark color. Once you’ve gotten it right and know that shade, it’s becomes easier to get it right from then on because you know exactly what to watch for.
- Leave the hot caramel sauce in the saucepan to cool at room temperature before transferring to a container.
Recipe
Ingredients
- 1 cup granulated sugar
- ¼ cup water
- ½ cup heavy cream at room temperature
- 2 tablespoons unsalted butter
- ¾ teaspoon kosher salt, or more to taste
Directions
- Pour the sugar and water in a medium heavy bottom pot and stir to combine. Cook over medium heat patiently so that it bubbles. Be sure not to touch the sugar. Hot sugar can cause very severe burns.
- Continue cooking until the sugar turns an amber brown color (this takes approx 10-12 min from the beginning of heating it) Turn off the heat and stir in the heavy cream. It will bubble up quite a bit for a while, but just keep stirring. After the bubbling has settled, remove from heat and stir in the butter until melted.
- Stir in the salt, adding more as desired. Serve warm drizzled over ice cream or whatever treat you want to add it to.
- Leave the salted caramel to cool and transfer into a sterilized jar – it will keep in the fridge for up to 2 weeks. To use the caramel sauce, either warm up slightly, adding a little water to thin if required, or simply spoon it into a hot liquid, such as milk.
Recipe by Bobby Flay
