Preparing for your stint on “The Great British Baking Show” and want to avoid the most common mistakes? A caramel sauce can separate in just a second too long of looking away from the pan, but don’t panic and throw it out yet: There might be a way to save it.
Caramel sauce typically separates because of uneven heating that causes the butter to melt before the sugar is ready, whether it was stirred too much at the beginning, wasn’t aligned properly on the stovetop burner, or the pan was simply too hot. To get the butter, sugar, and cream to properly mix, or emulsify, you can try a few different methods: One, remove from heat and stir vigorously. Two, add a tablespoon or so of hot water. Three, use an immersion blender. Once your caramel sauce has cooled down a bit, it’ll hold together and you can set it aside to worry about the other seven elements of your Semi-Finals Showstopper.
How to avoid separation
Now that you know how to save a ruined sauce, why not learn how to avoid ruining it in the first place? To caramelize your sugar flawlessly, it all comes back to even heating. First, make sure you have the right materials. Making homemade caramel candy or caramel sauce is a delicate process that’s not exactly made for beginners, so if you have cheaper saucepans that have hotter and colder spots across the pan instead of distributing heat evenly, you may have a difficult time. Investing in thicker or simply higher quality pans, or being aware of where hot spots seem to be and adjusting your pan’s placement on the burner accordingly might help mitigate this.
The second major tip is simple, but sometimes hard to keep in mind: You’ve really got to listen when the recipe says, “stir constantly.” Yes, it is totally valid to skip upper body day at the gym and replace it with making caramel, because stirring without stopping is quite the arm workout — but it’s also entirely necessary to evenly distribute heat and keep the components together.
If this all feels like a little too much for you, there is another, similar kind of sauce that might just be the easiest caramel of your life to make. It’s called dulce de leche, and involves placing a can of sweetened condensed milk in a pot of boiling water and leaving it there simmering for two to three hours. Maybe a little too time inefficient for a reality baking show, but if you’re simply making a special treat to serve when friends come over, dulce de leche might just be the much less finicky, but still plenty caramely, sauce for you.
