Hi everybody, I’m Paula Deen from Paula’s Home Cooking and I dropped in to share with you a couple of tips of caramelizing sugar. I’m going to start with the cup of granulated white sugar and I’m going to stir in just enough water to make it the consistency of a wet sand. I’m going to squeeze in approximately a couple of teaspoons of fresh lemon juice. Now, the lemon juices that I put in will help discourage crystallization on your pan. If you don’t have any lemons you can substitute it with cream of tartar, a white vinegar or a little corn syrup it will react and do the same thing that the lemon juice will.
And I’m going to put this over medium heat, I’m going to add a candy thermometer and I’m not going to stir it anymore because the more we stir the more we chance that will crystallize on it. So I’m going to cook this to anywhere between 320 degrees to 350 degrees. If your sugar wants crystallize on the side of your pan, all you have to do is take a brush and you will want to make sure that your brush is clean that it’s free of grease, just like you would your pan. You want to make sure all your utensils are clean and free of grease.
We would take a brush, dip it just plane water and go around to a pot and you can see just that quickly the crystallization is going. And remember it’s all right to swirl your pan but you don’t want to stir it and you can peep over here and see that it's becoming a golden brown and it will come to different stages. It will come to a kind of a light golden, a medium golden and then a darker golden. All right, so I’m going to cut off our heat and you’ll want to be very, very careful. There is nothing hotter than caramelized sugar it will take the skin off your fingers, so you want to make sure that you don’t coming contact with that sugar.
Now, this will work out well for several different things. It works perfectly and my Uncle Babba’s Benne Seed candy . Another thing is to make a caramel topping and all you have to is add a small amount of whipping cream and you’ve got a wonderful caramel sauce that’s grumptious on ice cream.