The Tale of Two Caramels

The Tale of Two Caramels

Let me sum up. We use two different caramel recipes, one in the spring for caramel corn and one in the fall for caramel apples, hand-dipped chocolates (turtles), and just plain caramel hand-dipped. The conflict which caused my brain to go down totally unnecessary rabbit holes was why, since caramel is water, fat, and sugar, do we have two different recipes?

Nobody could or would answer that cosmically important question, so I pulled out my science hat, which I admit hadn’t been used since my chemistry class in college 43 years ago, and figured it out.

Remember caramel is sugar, water, and fat. That’s it. Butter, corn syrup, cream, milk, brown sugar, etc, are just forms of those three ingredients.  So here’s what I did when I dusted off my science hat.

Utilizing dozens of website ingredient conversion tools, I converted the ingredients from the two recipes into a common measurement. In other words, I converted ounces, pounds, cups, sticks, etc. into grams. Take a look.

The spring caramel recipe translated like this with a total of 2,532 grams of ingredients.

The fall caramel recipe translated like this with 1,929 grams. Notice it’s smaller in volume, but not to worry, we scientifically superior-minded people can figure it out.

Each of these ingredients contains a percentage of water, a percentage of fat, and a percentage of sugar. So leaving volume behind, we could translate each ingredient into how much water, sugar, and fat it contributed to the whole. Take a look at this chart. It’s dull but brilliant, kind of like some of my rich friends. My interesting friends usually aren’t rich.

Notice how the percentages play out. For those of you like me who like pictures. This is the exciting answer to my cosmic quandary.

The two recipes are almost identical. So what’s the difference? Why does one have brown sugar and less butter? Why does one rely on cream and the other evaporated milk? Well if I answer that question here, I won’t have anything to explore in the next post.

We cooked both recipes side by side and found something very interesting. They both cause tooth decay and expansion of the belt! Check out the next post and I’ll share the very scientific or possibly very culinary results.