By: Mary

I feel about caramelish things the way some people do about chocolate. 🙂 (Although there is no way I can wrap my head around that fish-sauce caramel. Eeeeyurgh.) I made my milk jam/confiture de lait/dulce de leche in a crock-pot on low setting, because I hate being tied to the stove and fretting about scorching and that nasty milk skin. The last batches I used plain store milk and it was good but the next one I’m going to use the luscious grassfed raw milk I get from a local farm. I swear the cream takes up over a quarter of the half-gallon bottle! The recipe I used had a lot less sugar than the one you linked to, though; 500g sugar to 1/2 gallon milk, pinch of baking soda and bigger pinch of gray salt – love that sweet-salt thing going on, although the caramel/sea-salt trend these days tends to have too much salt and throws the balance off), and a vanilla bean although I’ve been using double-strength vanilla extract added at the very end because the vanilla bean seeds can lend an annoying grittiness sometimes.

I have a recipe for a dessert sauce that is half milk jam and half crème fraiche, more or less, proportions to taste – it went on a pear tart which was simply a shortbread crust (flour, sugar, butter and salt, and nothing else) with layers and layers and layers of paper-thin slices of pear topped with sliced almonds, baked very slowly so the pears essentially melted and the almonds browned… It was a royal pain in the can to make, even with a mandoline for the slicing. But ohhh, so good.