The other day, while flipping channels, I caught a bit of Emeril Lagasse’s Food Network show…sometimes I find him completely obnoxious, other times fairly entertaining…but anyway:
He was making desserts, and showed a Louisiana recipe for making caramel by simply putting a can of condensed milk in a simmering pan for 3 hours. Does this work? I would think in all my years, of watching my relatives do all sorts of mad science experiments with food, I would have come across this.
And wouldn’t this be dangerous if the water was too hot? I would like to try this, but fear having a milk-bomb going off in my kitchen.
1: Put a steamer basket or something at the bottom of the pot so that the can isn’t resting directly on the bottom.
2: Make sure the can is completely covered with water. And keep it covered. It’s also a good idea to put a lid on the pot so that juuuuust in case it does blow (I’ve never had it happen
3: It works fine for Eagle brand, but I’d be less comfy trying it with some weird off-brand that doesn’t have cans as sturdy.
4: It takes 2-3 hours to carmelize.
5: Keep it at a medium simmer.
6: The stuff is great with crushed pineapple on top. It’s also great stirred into a cup of coffee.
Of course if you get a huge explosion that coats your entire house in semi-caramelized milk goo, I only provided the above info for entertainment purposes only!
My Mom has been making it that way for years whenever she needs caramel. It is sinfully good, especially on homemade banana splits using homemade vanilla ice cream.
Wait, so can we get a more complete account of how to do this safely then? What sort of heat level? What sort of temperature. I’d definately like to try.
Get a steamer basket or something to keep the can off the bottom of the pot
put can on the steamer basket. Put steamer basket in water. Make sure there’s enough water to completely cover can by a couple of inches ('cause the water evaporates)
Turn heat on stove to medium or medium-high. You want bubbles but not a rolling boil
Cover with lid
Check every 30 minutes to make sure there’s still enough water and that it’s not rapidly boiling
Let it simmer for at LEAST 2 hour (I’ve gone as far as 3)
So long as the can is not resting on the bottom of the pot, and there is plenty of water, it is impossible for tempurature of the can to rise above 100 degres. The evaporating water wisks away the excess energy keeping the boiling water at a constant tempurature. Therefore, unless you have a weak can, it will not explode.
I did this. Once. The can exploded because I was on the phone and didn’t check the water level. No-one was hurt because no-one was in range, but it made an amazing noise, and an even more amazing mess. There was sticky caramel EVERYWHERE, it took me hours to clean up and ten years later, when I sold that house, I could still see bits of caramel high up on the ceiling I hadn’t been able to clean.
My advice is: don’t do it. Try making a caramel sauce from equal quantities of butter and cream to about twice that of brwon sugar. Bring gently to the boil and let simmer until the sugar dissolves and the sauce thickens a little.
A friend of mine tried this by putting the can directly onto a wood-burning stove. Bang! Caramel all over the ceiling. Luckily he was outside when it happened. Better to do it in boiling water.
Does anyone know if it’s possible to pierce the top of the can to make it safer, or does this prevent caramelisation?
jjimm as a guess, if you pierce the top of the can, you’d get either
a) All the goo leaking out through the hole (ever boiled an egg with a tiny crack in it?)
b) caramelly-liquid.
Th’ thing is, the pressure inside the can somehow…squeezes…the sweetened condensed milk into a solid…about the texture of tofu…but with a billion times more flavor! You can actually slice it into disks.
Another corroboration. This is how Mrs M makes banoffee pie filling (add sliced bananas and slather onto a crushed biscuit base, IIRC). Fenris is right, it’s comfortably thick enough to slice. Just don’t let it boil dry. Don’t go off and have a snooze while it’s simmering. And did anyone say not to let it boil dry? They’re right.
That milk.com recipe says you can punch a small hole, but I don’t buy it.
I’m going to try this soon, and we’ll see if my kitchen gets coated in splattered caramel (not that I’d mind all that much
I can get really good store-bought dulce de leche here too, so we’ll see how fresh compares to canned (or, rather, cardboard canned: which is very odd…)
I’m giving it a try, as soon as I walk to the corner store. If I want to make it thick, can I get it out of the can in one chunk or will I have to scrape it out?
