How to Make Perfect Caramel Sauce

Featured Pro: Curtis Stone
Category: Cooking
Time: 3:24


CURTIS STONE: Hey, I’m Curtis Stone, and this next GMC Trade Secret is sweet. I’m going to do a caramel sauce. Now, it’s not any old caramel sauce. It is the best caramel sauce in the world.

You need two things – sugar and cream. That’s it. It’s so, so easy. What I’ve got over here is a pan. Now, I’ve got an enamel-coated cast-iron pan. You don’t have to have one of those. You can use a stainless steel pan. You could even use a copper pan. That’s a good conductor. It’s actually really quick.

But what you’re going to do first is make the caramel, right? So you take some sugar and you put the sugar directly into a pot. Now, when you’re asked to make a caramel, a lot of recipes, what they’ll tell you to do is they’ll tell you to mix the sugar with some water. So then it slowly turns to liquid. It slowly dissolves, you know, when you put it over the heat.

I honestly don’t think you need to. And with all the pastry chefs I’ve worked with in the past, they do it just like this. So as long as you keep your eye on it, it’s really, really simple. You put the sugar into the dry pan. Okay, you turn the heat up. And then you just sort of – you move the sugar around a little bit. You don’t put a spoon in there and you don’t stir.

Now, if you have a look into the pan and have a look right around the edge, it’s all started to turn to liquid. Okay, that’s what you want now. Notice over here it’s starting to turn really quite dark. So you’ve got to be careful about this patch. You don’t want it to burn. So just give it a bit of a shake without stirring it too much. Put it back down and just keep your eye on them.

Okay, so it’s all starting to melt now, so that’s just what you want. Once that happens, give it another little shake. The temptation is to stick a spoon in there, but that’s the last thing you want to do, because you could crystallize the sugar. So that’s then going to make it hard to turn it into a caramel sauce. So just let this start to happen. Let it go nice and golden.

So the only thing left to do to this is to add your cream. Now, if you want to incorporate other flavors, of course you can. You can put alcohol in. You can put some vanilla in. You can put fresh fruit into it if you wanted to. So just stir that now and wait for those little lumps to disappear.

So congratulations. You just made your first caramel. Now, if you’ve got an apple or a little mini-apple and dipped it in here, you’d have a toffee apple. This is basically what we’ve done is just made a simple caramel.

So the sugar’s now at a really high temperature, so never, ever, ever put your finger in, because you will burn yourself. But take your cream and pour your cream. See that reaction? That’s because of the extreme heat of the sugar. You pour in your cream. And then this is just going to do its magic and turn itself into a caramel sauce. Let’s give it a stir. You can see that intense heat.

So you can turn it right down, scrape that off, and let’s have a look. Oh, look at that sticky caramel sauce. Yum. So I’m going to turn that off, because there’s enough residual heat still in this iron pan that’ll continue to sort of go through the sauce. So give it another little stir. I think I’m going to have mine over a little bit of vanilla ice cream.

So whether you’re cooking an apple pie and you want a little bit of sauce to go over it or if you’re just going to spoil yourself with a bit of ice cream like I’m about to, it really doesn’t matter. This is the most amazing sauce that you can literally do in minutes, and you can pull a dessert from nowhere. As long as you’ve got a bit of fresh fruit and some sugar and some cream, you’re ready to go. Oh, look at that. Yum.

I’m Curtis Stone. That’s your GMC Trade Secret. You now know how to make the best caramel sauce in the world.