This recipe for a silky, smooth and buttery caramel sauce is perfect for over ice cream and lattes. Save a couple of bucks and impress friends and family, whipping out your own bottle of the light-brown sauce.
Disclosure: Some of the links in this post are affiliate links, meaning that, at no cost to you, I may earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. Read more here.
Making caramel can seem a bit daunting. It is heating sugar and a little water until is a piping hot, bubbling mass. After that, you have to keep a close eye on the color, turning from clear to honey, to amber, the ultimate goal, before it hits a deep, very dark brown: that means bitter, and no longer usable. However, the result of a good caramel sauce is a nutty and rich sauce, perfect for your home-made lattes and ice cream treats. Save the money, and buy kitchen gadgets! This easyrecipe tells you how to make this wonderful, sweet caramel sauce.
Onto the sauce itself. A few things are important when it comes to making this caramel sauce. You will find many different recipes, with many different approaches, techniques and even ingredients. I have tried and tested to come up with one that is easy (make your sauce in about 15 minutes), without frills, and a couple of “sauce truths” that apply to this sauce.
Jump to RecipeCaramel explained.
Caramel is basically heated sugar, with or without water. The heat breaks down the build-up of the sugar, by taking out the water from the sugar itself. There is wet caramel, which is sugar with water (the version we use for this recipe) and dry caramel, which is just the sugar. The water in the sugar liquefies or melts the sugar. The process builds up slowly and it looks like nothing really happens for a bit, so patience is key. But in around 15 minutes this changes and things go pretty quickly. So then, speed is of the essence.
This sauce does not call for butter. Butter is a wonderful ingredient in many pan sauces, giving a beautiful shine and a velvety texture, but molten sugar in itself is too hot for the butter. Butter breaks down in fat and water and in this case, it adds nothing but calories. The heavy cream does its part, so why complicate it.
With that, let’s make some caramel!
Easy and tasty caramel sauce
Equipment
- High rim sauce pan with a tick bottom
- Thermometer
- Silicone or baker's brush
- Scale
- Thick glas jar, such as a Mason jar
Ingredients
- 225 grams sugar granulated
- 80 milliliter water
- 180 milliliter heavy cream, whipping cream fat is important!
Instructions
- Add the sugar to the sauce pan and add the water. Place over medium heat.
- Although you will find recipes that say, "do no stir", at this point you can, and I suggest you do: the sugar needs to be completely dissolved.
- Once all the sugar is dissolved, turn up the heat to medium-high, until the liquid turns amber. Wet the brush with water, and clean the sides of the small crystals that form. Don't stir, but you can carefully swirl the pan.
- After 10 to 15 minutes, the color turns from clear to a light honey, and after that, to amber. Once you hit that point – and not sooner – turn off the heat and add the heavy cream. The mixture will start to foam. Continue to mix, until the mixture settles down. Stir in the cream too soon and you don't have a caramel sauce, but a sugar sauce. Patience really is key.
- Turn the heat back on, and let the sauce reach a temperature of 107°C/225°F.
- Allow the mixture to cool, transfer to a jar and refrigerate.
- Although the jar works well, I find that a squeeze bottle dispenser works better to be able to pour the caramel. This caramel has cream, therefor you need to refigerate it. It can be stored for a month in the fridge. Freezing works as well: that way, it keeps up to 3 months.
I use a few tools that are handy in many situations. If cooking and baking is your “thing”, consider investing in them. For this specific recipe, the tools below are particularly handy.
- A Thermapen thermometer. I have briefly mentioned the Thermapen thermometer from Thermoworks in my Creme Anglaise recipe. This thermometer is not cheap, but it is fast, durable and accurate, all things you need while cooking. It is easy to set up, operate and clean, and I like the feature that the displayed temperature rotates according to how you hold it. More practical than handy: it is large enough that you don’t have to hold your hands directly above the hot pan or flame. It comes in 3 colors, I have red, which is gorgeous. Here is a direct link for the one I use and abuse.
For this recipe, you use the thermometer to gauge the temperature of the sugar-cream mixture, and not the sugar itself. The stage of the liquid’s color, the key to spot how far your caramel is, changes so quickly that just looking at it, works better. 
Silicone brush: even though this recipe is not as delicate as the caramel you make sure candy or sugar work, there is a small risk of crystallizing the caramel. This means that crystals form in the caramel while you cook it, and that triggers the growth of more crystals. The result is a grainy caramel instead of a silky liquid. You can salvage it, and even redoing is not that big of a deal, but why would you? A proven solution is wiping the inside of the pan just above the liquid with a brush with water. I have read that for this sauce it’s not needed, but I have seen it wrong. Why risk it, and it’s a good habit for when you make more caramel. Pick up my preferred brush, here.- Dispenser bottle: this type of bottle makes it easy to store and use the caramel sauce. Because there is cream in the sauce, you need to refrigerate it. Storing it in the bottle makes access easy. If the sauce becomes less liquid in the fridge, a quick blast in the microwave turns it liquid again. These bottles hold oils as well – I don’t fuss with my olive oil bottle anymore.
I hope this recipe was easy, and helps you with making caramel. It is rewarding to do, and the result is amazing. And remember, if it fails the first time, you will have lost 10 minutes, and 225 grams of sugar and a bit of cream. That’s it. The more you make this, the better you get at it. That is totally worth it.