Midnight Caramel Sauce and Caramel Toast

Here you have the result of a few years’ worth of midnight fridge raids. Caramel sauce is the easiest thing to make when you (1) have an insatiable hunger for all things sweet, and (2) your kitchen is nearabouts empty. It’s very, very hard to get wrong: All you need is sugar, butter, and any sort of rich dairy, like cream, half and half, or even milk.

Gather together your ingredients, because you’ll have to move quick. (Sugar has a way of charring to a carbonaceous mass the moment you take your eyes off it.) Put a few tablespoons of sugar in a pan, add a little splash of water, and put the pan on the lowest temperature your stove will go down to. After a while, the sugar will look like this:

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After a while more, the bubbles will disappear and the sugar will start changing color to a golden brown. This is when the butter goes in. It’ll spurt a bit so don’t lean in unless you want super-hot molten sugar in your eye! (Naturally, this is something I’ve done.) I generally use half as much butter as sugar, and let it cook for a bit to caramelize further.

Now the dairy! This step is easier with high-fat dairy like heavy cream, but milk is a perfectly serviceable replacement. Stand back once more because this will spurt and bubble up, too.

Finally: Stir for your life! There’ll be lumps at first, especially with milk (it’s easier with a whisk), but don’t stop stirring until you get thick, gloopy, golden caramel sauce:

caramel sauce

Purists will tell you to use a flaky, fancy salt if you want a bit of saltiness to it, but I freely chuck table salt into my caramel, so pssshhhh. Spread it on toast or wait for it to cool a bit before shoveling it in your face-hole with a suitable implement. It’s delightful either way.

The quick-and-dirty take on this theme is caramel toast:

1. Sprinkle sugar on top of bread and butter.
2. Put the bread in a frying pan, on the lowest heat.
3. Flip the bread sugar-side down!
4. Add MORE butter on the other side.
5. Toast both sides until the sugar caramelizes, or just keep flipping it around if you’re impatient like me.

The bread will feel pretty soggy in the pan, but that’s totally OK because it’s going to harden once it’s off the heat. This might look somewhat unprepossessing…

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…but I wasn’t even hungry when I made it, and it was still gone almost instantly. —Ragini ♦