You can control how caramel behaves by controlling its temperature. One second it is all melted down, golden goo. The next, you have crossed a tiny threshold and the sugar has burnt. It can be as little as thirty seconds, ten degrees of heating that separates a smooth sauce from a burnt mess.
Good results don’t depend on luck. Temperature control manage the stages. There are eight classic sugar stages. They refer to the transformation of texture as the sugar break down and water evaporates. A chart illustrate them.
How to Make Good Caramel Sauce
For fudge, most home cooks go only up to the so-called soft ball stage (a stage when the syrup will flatten if pressed between two adult-sized sofa). For caramel sauce, however, we need to have some patience. Push through the crack phases and the firm and hard ball stages. Keep going until you reach light caramel stage. This is just before the sugar begin to burn and turn dark. At that point, the sugar has turned from clear syrup to an amber liquid full of buttery flavor.
Your best backup plan: color. As the sugar cooks, it goes from pale yellow into vibrant gold, then into amber, and eventually brown. Each stage are shown by a different band of color. For ice cream topping, you’re looking for about 320°F and that lovely light golden color. If it get any darker, it will be very bitter and overwhelm the sweet treat. People mistake this bitterness for richness… Dark is rich, right? No. Dark means burnt when it comes to caramel.
How you start is every bit as important than how you finish. There are two main methods: dry, in which the raw sugar cooks right there in the pan; and wet, in which the sugar dissolve in some added water before hitting the heat. Wet (water buffers heat) is slower but more forgiving. Dry (it scorch instantaneous when it looks like it will) is fast but offers less margin of error.
Either way, you want to create even heating, no crystallization. Sauce goes to hell if it crystallizes. Seeds, like stray crystals around the edge of the pan, will make your mixture seize up and go all grainy. To avoid this fate, simply use a pastry brush dipped in water to wipe around the side of pot until sugar is dissolved. Once the sugar starts to melt, never ever stir the mix with a spoon, stirring stirs up crystal formation. Just lightly swirl the pan around by its handle to spread out the heat without introducing any starting points for crystals.
To prevent further cooking and turn this into a sauce, add cream once it’s gotten to the color you want. Before adding the cream, make sure it is hot. If you pour cold liquid onto 300+ degree sugar, it will violently boil and splatter in an unsafe and unpleasent way. It will also shock the sugar into hardening, making the sauce lumpy instead of smooth. Whisk continuously as you add the warm cream slowly and keep whisking until completely blended.
How do you store the completed sauce? Keep it fresh. Refrigerate and enjoy within weeks (or longer), just pop it out of the freezer and thaw as needed. When reheating, add a little water, either in the fridge or on the stovetop or in the micro, just until warmed through; this returns it to a pourable state. A nice gloss is what we want.
Once you master these steps, you’ll have a foolproof method that will give you control over each drop of a delicius treat.