Caramel Sauce

This caramel sauce can be used for just about anything (including the delicious bread pudding it originally accompanied). It also taught me several key lessons about cooking with sugar and making caramel (some of which I really ought to have known already):

• Never walk away from your caramel sauce
• Never touch hot caramel sauce
• Not every home has a candy thermometer
• There is a fine line between "rich caramel color" and burned caramel sauce
• Adding hot butter and cream to boiling sugar is much better than adding cold/lukewarm butter and cream to boiling sugar (the former is much less likely to cause your caramel sauce to seize and clump together into impossible balls of hard sugar)

Original source: Home Baked Comfort

Caramel Sauce

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Course: Dessert

Cuisine: American

Cook Time: 15 minutes minutes

Resting time: 30 minutes minutes

Total Time: 15 minutes minutes

Servings: 2 cups

Ingredients

• 1 ½ cup heavy cream
• 1 stick (4 ounces) butter softened, cubed
• ½ cup water
• 1 ½ cups (300 grams) sugar
• ¼ cup corn syrup
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• few large flakes sea salt like a nice French grey sea salt

Instructions

• In a small saucepan, gently heat the cream and butter together over low heat. Do not let this mixture simmer or boil. If it looks close, turn it off.
  
• Meanwhile, in a medium (2 to 4-quart) saucepan, combine the sugar and corn syrup with the ½ cup water and gently stir to mix. Place the saucepan over medium heat and continue to stir occasionally until the sugar dissolves. Be careful not to splash the sugar water onto the sides.
  
• Once the sugar dissolves, stop stirring, turn the heat up to high, and keep cooking until the mixture comes to 325 degrees F. DO NOT WALK AWAY. This part happens quickly. It will very quickly turn into a rich caramel color and you need to immediately remove the saucepan from the heat.
  
• Remove caramel sauce from heat, then slowly stream in the warm cream-butter mixture, whisking carefully to prevent seizing. Adding the dairy will cause the mixture to rapidly bubble upwards, so be careful. Whisk again until combined.
• Add vanilla and any desired sea salt. Allow caramel to cool.

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