Cooking win

[owlectomy]

As is the case with most Thanksgivings, my sister and I got a little ambitious.

"You know," I said. "[hip Brooklyn pie shop] Four and Twenty Blackbirds has a cookbook out."

"Salted caramel apple pie?"

"Salted caramel apple pie."

We had never before made caramel.

After getting some advice online to add the butter after caramelizing the sugar, not before, we stirred together the sugar and the water. It heated, and slowly started to boil, and then... all the water boiled away, and it started to get dry and crystallized, and just when it looked like a lost cause it started to melt. We added the butter when it turned coppery, and the butter melted, but then it didn't incorporate into the sugar and suddenly everything turned into a giant slab of crystallized sugar.

We had one more try. We didn't have the butter, the sugar, or the time to try again if we failed.

Sugar and water, again. Heat, again. A little higher, this time, in the hopes that the sugar would caramelize before all the water boiled off. We replaced the battery on the meat thermometer. Slowly, the temperature went up. Slowly, the sugar changed from white to weirdly off-grey to pale yellow to light brown. The butter went in, and melted. The heat went off; the cream went in.

It was caramel.

It was a ridiculously good pie.

Comments

[brigid]

I use the smitten kitchen recipe for salted butter caramel with the caveat that she recommends you brown the sugar more than I personally like, and which I always forget, so I usually burn the first batch because I make it so rarely. But when I get it right? Oh GOSH it's so good. I think I'm going to make another batch soon... I left my last batch with my parents at Thanksgiving.