Keep it Clean: Always start with extremely clean tools. At these high temperatures Rose Levy Beranbaum says in her book The Baking Bible, “The darker you make your caramel, you risk burning it if you don’t have an absolutely accurate thermometer.” Keep your Thermapen ready to go. Basically, you burn it to a very specific doneness! But once you get into the high-temperature caramel stages of sugar cooking, care needs to be taken to monitor the temperature or that “careful burning” will turn into uncontrolled burning-don’t walk away! If you like caramel that tastes deep and robust, you can push the temperature up to about 380✯ (193☌) but go much further and you’ll get an unpleasant bitter flavor that cannot be fixed. Solving burning: Caramel gets its flavor from very controlled chemical changes in sugar. But if you add water and/or acid to the sugar and then heat it, it dissolves, splitting the fructose from the glucose-a process called “inversion.” Inverted sugar is much easier to keep from crystalizing. Solving crystalization: Sugar (sucrose) is made of a molecule of fructose stuck to a molecule of glucose, and it likes being in its tight crystal shape. These problems need not create any barrier for us, however-they can both easily be overcome. it can crystallize while it’s cooking and become gritty, and….But if you use Thermapen ® ONE for the temperature, and follow our easy tips, you’ll have the tools you need to make your caramel apples-or any other sugar project-a sweet success.Ī couple of the most common problems with cooking sugar are Yes, all candy presents certain challenges: sugar has very specific cooking stages, so you need to use precise temperature control, understand what’s happening to the sugar, and be aware of how to avoid crystallization. Making caramel involves cooking sugar, which can be intimidating but once you understand some critical points in the sugar cooking process and you’re equipped with the right tools, it’s easy. But if a perfect apple doesn’t signal fall quite strongly enough for you, you can always dip it in rich, warm-flavored caramel! Yes, fall is caramel apple season, and whether you have your own trees, live near an orchard where you can pick your own, or just rely on your local grocer, this is the time to enjoy this classic confection.Īnd if you want your apples to be even better, ditch the store-bought wrapped caramels and make your own caramel for dipping. Few foods spell autumn like a crisp, juicy, sweet/tart apple, fresh from the tree.
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