stories:
Nagging Question
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How Is Toffee Different from Caramel?It comes down to butter and heat |
Toffee and caramel are similar in color and flavor, but are different in two main ways—butter content and final cooking temperature—explain Bruce Weinstein and Mark Scarbrough, creators of the “Ultimate” cookbook series, which includes The Ultimate Candy Book.
“Toffee is basically sugar and butter,” they write in an email. “Caramel is sugar and cream or milk, with butter occasionally in the mix.” To make toffee crunchy, it is cooked to 300 degrees Fahrenheit, while caramel stays smooth when cooked to about 248 degrees Fahrenheit (but hardens at around 270 degrees).
“To get that chewy, gooey texture of caramel, you have to add a liquid, like milk, cream, or condensed milk,” says Christina McCoy Cohn, co-owner of the Nashville Toffee Company in Tennessee. Because caramel is cooked to a lower temperature, it retains some of the moisture from these liquids, creating a softer texture, says Doug Simons, president of the Enstrom’s candy company.
On a microscopic level, Simons says, you’re creating two types of sugar crystals by cooking the candies differently. In toffee, you get short-grain crystals, which make the candy break easily, whereas caramel’s long-grain crystals enable it to bend.
CHOW’s Nagging Question column appears every Friday.
how 'bout a recipe for each?
What she said!
You bet. Here are two recipes we developed for caramel and toffee sauces:
Salted Caramel Sauce
http://www.chow.com/recipes/11368
Sticky Toffee Pudding (with toffee sauce)
http://www.chow.com/recipes/10973
Enjoy!
Here is how my grandmother used to make caramel for filling her chocolate candies:
1. remove the label from a can of sweetened condensed milk
2. Put the can in a pot of water
3. Bring it to a boil and simmer for 3 hours (be sure to keep water in the pan! I've heard that if the water runs out the can will explode - dangerous and messy)
4. Remove the can, allow it to cool some and then open it. That's it!
I was given the "boil a sealed can of sweetened condensed milk" as a recipe for Dulce de Leche. It's delicious and great spread on just about anything. I can personally verify that it's very important to keep an eye on the water level - first time I made this I forgot it was on the stove until I heard "POP! Clang clang clang" - after the water boiled away the can did indeed explode and the kitchen was covered floor to ceiling in brown stickiness, LOL.
What about what the Brits call toffee?
i find that caramel and toffee taste different.. caramel is sweeter, while toffee is a bit (i don't know what word to use) "smokier"? ha ha ... but both cause tooth aches and cavities *winks*
llamapyjamas - I may be able to answer your Q as I'm a Brit who runs a toffee company in the UK. :-) Toffee for us is usually a hard-ish but chewy medium to dark coloured confectionary. My family founded Riley's Toffee a few years back and this hard recipe was the type of toffee they used. It's made using the method mentioned above for brittle toffee or hard toffee. However with the passage of time we've found that our customers prefer a softer toffee so our current recipe produces a more caramel like toffee. (could this be the Riley's fans of yesteryear who now have more dentures and therefore prefer a softer toffee?) Either way we Brits love toffee. Hard or soft, we can't seem to get enough of it! ;-) Hope this helps.
Thanks, FreyaSykes; that does help!