You know, until I read this thread I had no idea caramel was made from milk.
Hooray for fighting ignorance!
The fresh is MUCH better. BTW: I looked at some notes I’d made: 1.5-2 hours for thick, pour it in coffee for coffee heaven-pancake batter consistancy, 2.5-3.5 hours for solid.
Fenris
It isn’t, actually.
Caramel is made from melted sugar. You can add stuff to it (like milk or butter) to give it a different consistancy, but caramel=melted sugar.
What’s happening is that the high pressure/heat causes the sugars in the sweetened condensed milk to caramelize. The milk* makes it yummy and creamy, but it’s the sugar doing the caramelization.
Fenris
*Yeah, I know. Lactose=milk sugars, but let’s not go there.
For those of you who are worried about the cans exploding, it works just fine in a pressure cooker.
Here’s a link with pressures and times:
The easiest way to get stuff out of a can in one piece is to open (but not remove) both ends, and push the contents through. With a manual wheel-type opener, turning it backwards a bit at first gets the end off cleanly.
Watch that water level, and enjoy!
I love my pressure cooker, but as a vegitarian, I’m always trying to find ways to justify owning one beyond just things like a super-fast risotto.
Here in Oz (and New Zealand) sweetened condensed milk was a staple in pioneer times (about twenty years before I was born) and the boiling in the tin caramel thing has been popular with ladies of a certain age, for many a long year.
So much so, in fact, that the makers of sweetened condensed milk have recently bought out a product which is already caramelised. Same size tin and all, just a label showing tempting looking brown goo, instead of a happy cow.
No explosion problems, y’see?
However as a recently diagnosed diabetic (type 2, since you ask) I can’t even think about such things without my blood sugar level rising. I’ll have to go and take a Diaformin now, straight after my Homer impersonation.
Mmm… sweetened condensed milk caramel (pre-cooked)… gurgle gurgle…
Redboss
Can you make this with the low-fat sweetened condensed milk (NOT evaporated milk) or does it have to be the regular sweetend condensed milk (NOT evaporated milk).
Yeah, right, I’m thinking calories in this thread.
What if you cook the can in a crockpot? Would that be safer than on the stovetop?
Mrs Pergau, usually makes a bunch of them at christmas when we are boiling the christmas puddings!
They last for ages in the unopened can.
But I hate Banoffi!
I’d never heard of this before a camping trip some of my buds and I went on many years ago. One of my partners pulls out a can of condensed milk and tosses it into the edge of the campfire.
Everyone was like “what the hell?” and he says “trust me” and sure nuff the next day when he opened up the cooled can it was a delicious treat. I don’t recall the exact recipe but he probably removed it after a few hours or he may have left it in the dying embers but it’s good stuff!
What Fenris said.
Caramel is melted sugar; add dairy products to it and you have toffee or butterscotch or fudge or tablet or whatever.
Mission successful. After 2 hours of (admittedly tentative) simmering it had the consistancy of the caramel on McDonalds’ sundaes. A bit creamier, but just as pourable.
They make low-fat sweetened condensed milk? !
In any case I suspect it would work just fine. Since it’s the sugar that caramelizes, not the fat, I suspect that there would only be a slight reduction in the “richness” of the caramel.
:: rushes out to get low-fat sweetened condensed milk to try it with ::
Hell, I’m thinking Weight Watchers points! Anybody? 
We have a book called The Sweet Potato Queens’ Book of Love. Very funny book. The author has dubbed the concoction “danger puddin’”.