Salted Caramel C'est Magnifique!

A friend just started a great dinner tradition called "UN Food Gathering" which gives foodies like myself to create a dish from a country and share a night eating dishes from around the world with other foodies. Since I was a French baker in my past life (even if I don't believe in reincarnation), I decided to represent France through three ice cream flavors: Salted Caramel, Goat Cheese and Honey Lavender. I also made some French macarons, which I will post later since it's a great way to use egg whites from egg yolks used in ice cream recipes. But this article is dedicated to one of my favorite ice cream flavors: Salted Caramel Ice Cream.

Salted Caramel Ice Cream
Photo by my friend Christina Liang Wei-lun

What I love about this ice cream is that unlike other homemade ice creams, this stays soft and pliable even after freezing, producing a creamy texture until the last scoop! I also love the fact that it's really made of simple ingredients: sugar, salt butter, milk, egg yolks, salt, heavy cream and vanilla extract --stuff you can find in your kitchen. For the salt, I do get fancy and put the finest Fleur de sel I can find.

The recipe I used was from my favorite ice cream author/blogger/foodie, David Lebovitz, who I mention often (because he's an ice cream genius). David's recipe is formally called "Salted Butter Caramel Ice Cream".
Since this recipe calls for a lot of attention (do not have the TV on or have the kids to distract you), make sure to have all the ingredients out. The first thing you should do is create an ice bath. I didn't know what an ice bath was before I made ice cream.

My ice bath filled with milk

An ice bath is simply a large bowl filled with ice and some water, then place a smaller bowl on top of it. An ice bath is very important to ice cream making because it will cool your custard quickly so you don't end up with egg bits in your ice cream (confused yet? it's ok, it will make sense when you make ice cream).

Now for the scary part of the recipe...

The most challenging thing about this recipe is burning sugar to the point it turns into a copper color. If you burn the sugar too much, it just becomes bitter and if you undercook the sugar, the caramel is more like sugar syrup. It took me about three or four times of burning sugar in a pan to get this right for me.

Burning sugar to caramel

In David's website, he has a great description on how to burn the caramel just right. The trick to making sure your caramel burns right is not to stir the sugar too much in the beginning and make sure the heat is distributed evenly throughout the pan. I accomplish this by taking the pan and moving it around so it doesn't burn one side of the pan too much. Once you think the sugar is burnt enough, do not hesitate and take it out of the heat right away and place the butter. After that part, everything else was pretty easy to do.


Salted Caramel Ice Cream
Photo by my friend Christina Liang Wei-lun

A revision I've done from David's recipe was to put a little bit more milk than he called for. I did this because I thought it was too sweet for me and I wanted to lighten it a bit. I also ommitted making my own caramel bits, which he says to do as a mix-in ingredient (you put these bits towards the end of the ice cream machine process). The caramel bits turn gooey which is great if you want more sweetness to the ice cream. But I like to keep my Salted Caramel pure in its form and keep it simple. So give this recipe a go!