Salted butter caramel sauce

Caramel that goes past gold

A caramel sauce is sugar cooked until it changes colour and flavour, then made fluid with cream. Here the sugar and butter are melted together first, which gives a richer, more buttery base than sugar cooked alone. The account is clear that the colour matters more than the clock: the mixture should be cooked dark, close to burnt but not quite.

That dark stage is also the point at which the sauce can go wrong. A cook who stops early gets a pale, sweet sauce with less depth, and one who goes past the line tastes burnt. The account does not give a colour reference or a temperature, so the cook judges by sight and smell.

Adding the cream

Cream is poured in off the heat, slowly and with constant stirring, because the hot sugar reacts sharply with cold liquid. The account says the cream should be at room temperature. A sauce that seizes when the cream goes in has usually had it added too quickly or while the cream was cold; the Lebovitz advice quoted in the account is to warm it gently over low heat and stir until any stubborn bits dissolve.

Flaky salt goes in at the end. The sauce is not finished when the salt is stirred in: it is a sauce to serve warm or to store chilled, and the account adds that a little vanilla or balsamic vinegar may be stirred in as an option.

Keeping and gaps

The account recommends serving warm, or cooling and refrigerating for up to two weeks. It gives no room-temperature storage time. The recipe is attributed to David Lebovitz only as an inspiration; the original text on his own site could not be read for this page, so the quantities here are the adapted version the account publishes, and the page does not claim they match his.