For the past few months I have been experimenting with chocolate and caramel sauce. I think I have finally figured out how to achieve the perfect sauce for my coffee. For this blog post, I'm going to focus on caramel sauce. Usually I make caramel and chocolate sauce at the same time. I wasn't out of chocolate and I couldn't wait any longer to make caramel. I almost broke down and bought some Hershey's but it's hard for me to justify $2+ for a bottle that will last about a week in my house. I can get a 5 lb bag of sugar, not on sale, for that much and make about 5 bottles of sauce! Plus it wouldn't save me time, and I would actually have to get out of my jammies to go to the store!
On to the "recipe"! I use the term recipe loosely. I would rather use the word "ratio".
To get started you will need sugar, water, sweetened condensed milk and, if you want to do salted caramel, salt. I would recommend using the biggest sauce pot you have, also. The one I use is 3 qts. It has worked well. Another tool to use is a silicon spatula that doesn't have a plastic handle. The sugar gets really hot and I have had a plastic handle melt inside the silicone.
The recipe I typically use is-
5 cups sugar(2 parts)
2.5 cups water(1 part)
1/2 can sweetened condensed milk(this is the reason I make chocolate sauce at the same time. I use the other half in the chocolate) if you are only doing caramel you can still use the whole can of sweetened condensed milk. It's not going to hurt anything.
5 cups sugar(2 parts)
2.5 cups water(1 part)
1/2 can sweetened condensed milk(this is the reason I make chocolate sauce at the same time. I use the other half in the chocolate) if you are only doing caramel you can still use the whole can of sweetened condensed milk. It's not going to hurt anything.
To start, put your desired amount of sugar in a pot. Heat over medium high heat. Stir occasionally until the sugar starts to melt. The more it melts the more frequently you stir. 
You want the sugar to be completely dissolved with no little chunks of sugar left. Sometimes when it's almost dissolved I turn the heat to medium. You don't want to burn the sugar. It's a stink that will linger in your house for days and a waste of sugar!
Once it's totally dissolved you remove it from the heat.
Next is the scariest part of the whole process! Adding water to the super hot melted sugar.
Be very, very careful!!
Start adding water about 1 Tbsp at a time and stirring a lot but be careful because there will be a lot of steam(steam burns are a possibility if you don't have a long enough handle on your spatula). The sugar will be bubbling the entire time you stir. When the bubbling lessens that's when it's time to add another tbsp water. A little remix of a poplar song comes to mind "just keep stirring, just keep stirring"(carefully!! Seriously!).
Once you have added all the water you need, stir it some more. You want it to cool a bit more before you add in the sweetened condensed milk or the milk will break and look curdle-y.
Honestly, this happened to the batch I made today. Surprisingly, it wasn't ruined. I almost trashed it. I poured some in a jar to cool a little. I shook it after about an hour. It all incorporated back together, so I proceeded to shake the rest and it's smooth and delicious. Crisis averted! I didn't take pictures because it would prove I'm not perfect! Haha!
That's all there is to it! I store it in the fridge because it weirds me out to keep anything with dairy in it on the counter. I refill Hershey's bottles to store my sauces because I'm too cheap to buy something else.
I took a picture of the ingredient list on the Hershey's caramel. I don't make caramel to be healthier(duh!), but it does make me feel a little better that I'm eliminating some of the ingredients on this list.
