You’ve never been much of a chocolate fan. All of your friends have raved about it and talked about it like it’s the best thing that was ever created, but to you it’s just…meh. But caramel on the other hand…you love it more than life itself. You put it on everything, including ice cream sundaes, brownies, broccoli, mashed potatoes, turkey gizzard salads…literally everything. So of course, you would love to make your own caramel, right? It’s actually much easier than you think to do this, as there are not many ingredients required. To make scrumptious, sweet, amazing caramel in your own kitchen, you’ll need these things:
- Sugar
- Butter
- Milk
- Vanilla Extract
You probably have all of those things right in your kitchen already, and if you don’t, chop chop! Don’t waste another second before getting to the grocery store and grabbing them (preparing to run fast from people chasing you if you don’t want to waste time paying for them), so that you can get right to making your own caramel!
How to Make Caramel – Dump It All In!
The first thing you should do is take all of the ingredients except for the vanilla and just dump them all into a pot. If you want to get creative, you can use whatever type of sugar you want. You can even replace it with salt if you would like to try something completely different. You’ve had salted caramel, right? Considering how much you loved it, imagine how great it would be if you replaced all the sugar with salt! It would be a taste sensation that you would never forget, one that you would be talking about for years to come.
How to Make Caramel – A Different Kind of Melting Pot
Now, what you should do is put the pot over some kind of heat source. It doesn’t matter exactly what the heat source is. It could be a stove, which is what most people use, but you could also do it over the fireplace or head on down to your local chemistry lab and use a Bunsen burner if you would prefer. Let the sugar (or whatever crystallized substance you chose to use), milk, and butter just melt into a gooey deliciousness. You can consistently stir it if you would like to, or you could opt for the more interesting choice of letting it be uneven in consistency so that every bite ends up being a surprise!
How to Make Caramel – Let It Chill Out
Once you have melted the ingredients to the point where you want them, you should let the mixture cool down. That is, unless you want it to be scalding hot when you eat it. Maybe you want to burn away all of your taste buds, who knows. We won’t judge if that is the case. But if it is not, you would definitely be better off letting the caramel cool down before you go any further into this process. Better yet, forget about it completely and leave it there for days. It’ll be completely solid by then, and you’ll have the bonus of dust and insects stuck all over the top.
How to Make Caramel – The Add-Ins
Now, you have the chance to get very creative with your caramel. You can add in just the vanilla at this point if you want, but where’s the fun in that? If you used sugar to make your caramel instead of salt, you can add in some salt at this point for regular salted caramel. Even if you used salt to begin with, just add some more! Whoever said less is more didn’t know what they were talking about! You also have the chance to add any other ingredients that you think could make your caramel as amazing as possible. You can add in sprinkles if you want to make it even sweeter and more colorful, little bits of broccoli if you want to give it some nutritional value, or dog hair if you just want a place to put the results of your dog’s incessant winter shed. Anything goes!
How to Make Caramel – Put It Wherever You Want!
After a long, laborious process, you are finally ready to taste the fruits of your labor (if you actually put fruit in your caramel, you can take that phrase literally). If you are someone who likes to eat caramel on its own, just go ahead and go to town on it! But if you are like most people, you like caramel best when it is put on top of something. So go ahead and put it on top of whatever you want. And this isn’t just limited to desserts. You can put it on top of your dinner, your television set, or even your head if you want. You can drizzle it all over your house if you made enough to do so, so that the next time those crazy neighbor kids TP your house, their work ends up lasting forever and ever. The sky is the limit when it comes to using caramel in your all-important pursuit of happiness!