Sugar Cooking

There are two methods for cooking sugar: "wet" and "dry." For either method, you need a perfectly clean saucepan and clean white sugar--stray crumbs of any sort can cause the caramel sauce to crystallize, become grainy, and seize up.

For the dry cooking method, you simply heat sugar in a heavy saucepan until it melts and begins to brown. You don't stir the pan at all--you just watch it all happen from a safe distance. The browning (caramelization) of the molten sugar happens quickly.

• To help prevent the caramel from crystallizing, you can add an acid to the sugar before you begin: add about half a tablespoon of lemon juice to each cup of sugar and mix it with your hands; it should be the consistency of wet sand.
• Heat the sugar over medium-high heat until it melts. You can shake the pan gently to redistribute the melting sugar, but don't stir.
• When the sugar is melted and caramelized, immediately remove the pan from the heat and submerge the bottom of the pan in a water bath to stop the cooking process. (You need a heavy pan for this step, or your cookware can warp.)

Many of our recipes use the dry sugar cooking method:

Personally, I like this method better. I think that it's easier to get good results, because it gives you greater control over the degree of caramelization--you can stop at pale gold, or take it all the way to a deep amber…or even a mahogany color, for a burnt-sugar taste.

You can use the wet sugar cooking method for any caramel sauce recipe: simply add 1/4 to 1/3 of a cup of water to every cup of sugar in your recipe.

To make the caramel, pour the water into a heavy-bottomed saucepan. Add the sugar and heat over medium-high heat.

• You can stir the pan to dissolve the sugar, but once the mixture comes to a boil, stop stirring: the agitation can promote crystallization, which will result in grainy caramel.
• You can also use a lid on your pan to speed up the boiling process, but once it's boiling, leave the lid off: all of the water needs to evaporate before the sugar can start to caramelize.

The water is boiling off and the sugar is just beginning to color.

This is one of those tasks during which you "tie your apron strings to the stove," as one of my chef instructors used to say. You don't want to walk away, because sugar changes from golden to mahogany brown very quickly--you need to watch it constantly once it begins to color. (It's also a good idea to have ice water nearby, just as a precaution. Sugar burns are extremely painful, so be careful when working with caramel.)

When you get to a nice medium caramel color, pull the pan from the stove and pour the caramel into ramekins if you're using the caramel for flan.

If you're adding other ingredients like butter or cream, now's the time to do it. It'll spit and foam and rise up the sides of the pan, so be careful.

Turn off the heat and keep stirring until the butter melts and the ingredients are all incorporated. (Adding cold cream will cause the caramel to harden; if that happens, keep cooking the sauce over low heat until it melts again.)

Adding butter and cream to hot caramel will keep it soft and sauce-like--otherwise, it'll firm up solid and need to be melted again before you can use it (see the sidebar for a basic caramel sauce recipe). Drizzle your caramel sauce over ice cream, cheesecake, bread pudding, or in recipes like these: