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.

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.

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.

Wet caramel is made by combining sugar and a liquid and cooking them together, while dry caramel is made from just sugar, heated in a dry pan until it liquefies and browns.

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.

However, the defining characteristic of salted caramel is the addition of salt – often sea salt or fleur de sel. The salt does not overpower the sweetness but instead provides a delightful contrast. It enhances the caramel's flavour, cutting through the richness and bringing a unique depth to the overall taste.

The butter, sugar and syrup are melted together and should form a smooth sauce. When the sauce cools it should remain amalgamated. 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.

Why is my homemade caramel not hardening? ›

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.

If you're using heavy cream, note that it contains more water (less butterfat) than double cream. If your caramel sauce ends up too runny, cook it for a few minutes longer to remove some of the moisture – this will thicken it up. (And next time, try using a slightly smaller amount of heavy cream.)

However, heating it too much risks ruining it. Maple syrup is a saturated solution at room temperatures and if you heat it too much and cool it down it stops being a liquid and starts acting more like a solid.

Storing maple syrup in the open is a probable cause of crystallization. When syrup is exposed to air, it evaporates and crystallizes, creating lumps of sugar that are too hard to cook with.

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!

Traditionally, caramel is made by heating sugar at a particular temperature until it melts and gradually turns brown. Usually, this process begins around 320°F, when the sugar melts and becomes a clear molten liquid. After that, if the temperature increases, the caramel will begin turning into a darker shade of brown.