Caramel, Part III: If It's Poison, Here's a Hint. Don't Eat It.

Back to the history.

Most books and experts on starting small businesses will tell you that doing research before you start is really important. And it is. But at this point around a month ago I wasn't thinking about starting a business making caramels, I was just interested in learning how to make them in the first place.

I read literally dozens of caramel recipes and articles about the science of caramel. Caramel is made from some chemical magic that occurs between sugar and the protein in milk, called the Maillard reaction. Most of the recipes (including the one in the previous link) called for various combinations of the following list of ingredients: white sugar, corn syrup, condensed sweetened milk, and butter. Some of them skip the butter. Some call for heavy cream. One rare example suggested using brown sugar. A few add sea salt to make the more haught-sounding "sea salt caramels." I tried a few more batches before Paul and Elda took pity on me, but none of them worked.

However, I couldn't get past the fact that most of them used refined sugar and high fructose corn syrup. I like to make healthy food. I like slow food, locally grown, organic, raw, food with lots of living enzymes and animal fats in it. My food bible is Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and The Diet Dictocrats. An embarrassingly iconoclastic title, but that should be enough to tell you that I can get kind of worked up about food.

So at this point, after ruining several batches and being faced with the possibility that caramel might not work with healthier ingredients, I was ready to quit this caramel business before it even started.

High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS)

If even a single scientific study shows that something kills rats, I'm just not eating it. ( It also, according to several studies, makes you fat, causes diabetes, is mostly made with genetically modified corn, and other wonderful things) It's also manufactured in an absolutely disgusting way. The most charitable thing I have read about high fructose corn syrup is that it's a cheap alternative to refined sugar which is also very bad for you.

But I had to face facts. Although I blamed my caramel disaster on the lack of a thermometer, it very well could have been a result of the unorthodox ingredients I was using. However, now that I knew what generally went into caramel, I wasn't going to eat it unless I made it myself, and I didn't think that was really an option. So I decided to make my next batch of caramels using what I felt were better, healthier ingredients, and risk another disaster, rather than use refined sugar and HFCS.

Using the thermometer this time, using Rapadura, some Billington's Molasses Sugar, a touch of Organic Maple Syrup, Vanilla, Heavy Cream and Butter, I cooked a new batch to 254 degrees.

It came out dark. Very, very dark. And they were harder than I wanted them to be. It didn't look like caramel, frankly and I had already resigned myself to disappointment.

And then I tasted it.