I recently forayed into the scary world of making my own caramel sauce. My first attempt was wet method, and I didn’t pay close enough attention, resulting in a smoking, burnt sugary mess. My second attempt was dry method, resulting in beautiful, creamy, perfect consistency to pour into my morning iced coffee goodness. However, it took about an hour and a half. SO: Do you use wet or dry method? Why? Any tips in general?
I’ve made caramel based candy, but never caramel sauce. Can you link to your recipe?
Dry. Water is just a crutch in this situation. Just be sure to watch carefully, and you’re fine.
I am not much of a sweets person, but FWIW, if I were going to attempt something that might be technical or finicky I’d look to Cook’s Illustrated/America’s Test Kitchen, whose recipes are obsessively tested to be as “foolproof” as possible.
Here is the dry method, the one that turned out well, but took way longer than the recipe stated. This is probably because my caramel seized up when I added the milk, and I had to remelt it.
I can’t find a link to the wet method I used (I found in on Pinterest and apparently didn’t save it), but my notes say that it was 1c white sugar and 1 c water. Bring to a boil over medium WITHOUT STIRRING. Continue boiling for 15-20 minutes, still no stirring. Warm 1c heavy cream in the microwave for 45 seconds. Stir into sugar mixture and let cool. The problem with this one is that I took the recipe at face value, and it started to burn at about 12 minutes.
I’m a pretty good cook and baker in general, but I never considered making something like caramel sauce until I became too poor (new apartment, way higher rent) to want to spend the money on bottled coffee flavor. I didn’t realize it would be that finnicky, so I didn’t research too much. All the recipes I read after the first disaster said it’s easy enough, but you really have to watch it, because it goes from good to burned in literally seconds!
I use wet because it’s much less finicky and you can conceivably step away for a few seconds (JUST a few seconds!) with no ill effects.