Salted Maple Caramel Sauce (easy recipe!) (2024)

FAQs

How is caramel sauce made from scratch? ›

Combine brown sugar, butter, and milk in a saucepan and bring ingredients to a boil. Remove thickened mixture from heat before adding (optional) vanilla extract. Let the caramel cool slightly before using. The result is an impossibly rich sauce that is guaranteed to satisfy your sweet tooth.

Pure maple syrup is actually made from maple tree sap that's been boiled down to reduce the water content and concentrate the sugars. Those sugars caramelize, resulting in maple syrup's characteristic rich color and flavor.

This truly the best salted caramel I've ever had and there's only 4 ingredients required: sugar, butter, heavy cream, and salt. This salted caramel is a reader favorite recipe, marking its spot in the top 10 most popular recipes on my website. It's sweet, sticky, buttery, and tastes phenomenal on anything it touches.

Add more sugar to the sauce.

Most caramel sauces are made by caramelizing sugar and adding milk and a little salt. If you increase the amount of sugar in the recipe you'll end up with a thicker caramel. Try increasing the sugar by about 1/3.

There are two basicmethods of making caramel – dry and wet – each have pros and cons. Dry caramel is simply sugar, melted and cooked to a deep gold colour. It's quick to make, but easy to burn. A "wet" caramel uses water and sugar; it cooks more slowly, but is prone to crystallising.

Maple syrup that is boiled too long will crystallize and maple syrup that isn't boiled long enough will spoil quickly and will be watery because the concentration of sugar in the syrup will be too low.

Early season maple syrup tend to be clear and light in taste. As the season advanced, it becomes darker and more caramelized in flavour. Maple syrup's flavor starts blossoming during the evaporation process.

Caramel is simply sugar that has been melted and then cooked until it browns (caramelized). Salted caramel is the same, just with the addition of salt.

Caramel and dulce de leche might look and taste somewhat similar, but they are actually pretty different. While caramel is made from slowly simmering water and sugar until it caramelizes, dulce de leche is made from simmering milk and sugar super slowly until it turns into a creamy, caramelized substance.

Bitter caramel means burned caramel. So if yours taste bitter, you've overcooked it. You can do nothing about it after, only heat it a bit shorter the next time.

Why does the butter separate when making caramel sauce? ›

If the butterfat separates out then usually this is due to the mixture being either heated or cooled too quickly, which "shocks" the mixture and causes the fat to separate out. It can also be caused by the mixture being heated unevenly (if the pan has a thin base and has hot spots).

If caramels are too soft, that means the temperature didn't get high enough. Again place the caramel back into a sauce pan with a couple of tablespoons of water and heat to 244°F. If you don't have a candy thermometer, you can test with a cold water test. Details on how to use this method can be found here.

Never leave your caramel sauce unattended: To make caramel sauce you essentially toast white sugar until it's melted, before adding in butter, cream, and salt. Your sugar can go from toasty to burnt pretty quickly though, so make sure you keep a close eye on it! Don't forget the salt!

Caramel is made by heating sugar to the point where it melts, causing a breakdown of sucrose molecules into different flavor compounds. Think about the flavorless sweetness of white granulated sugar and the deep, dark complexity of caramel sauce.