Recently, while preparing to teach a private cooking class at Cooktique in Tenafly, New Jersey (www.cooktique.com), I was considering a number of possible desserts.  For a menu built around grilled marinated flank steak with coffee chipotle glaze, my thoughts turned naturally to chocolate.  Actually, my thoughts always turn naturally to chocolate, but especially when planning a menu with beefsteak. 

The menu needed to be approachable for participants at all levels of culinary experience, so it was simple to put aside thoughts of cakes and other sweets that require real baking in favor of an easy sauce for ice cream that is also easy to love.  In fact, I have never heard any American say no to the idea of a hot fudge sundae.

The recipe below was created only about two years ago for my chocolate week at the Culinary Center of New York (www.culinarycenterny.com).  In looking over my sauce recipes – raspberry coulis, caramel sauce, white chocolate sauce, crème anglaise, etc. – I had noticed the lack of a really old-fashioned fudgy sauce for ice cream that could be as gooey or as creamy as desired.  In fact, I hoped to reproduce the hot fudge from my childhood, the one they served at the Guilford Dairy Bar in Burlington, North Carolina.

While we can never go home again (and nor would I want to, thank you very much), it is often an exciting challenge to try to create a dish that will not only be delicious but also warm the cockles of the heart in a Proustian way.  For this hot fudge, I reasoned that it would be simplicity itself to create a sauce even better than the one from a simpler place and time.  With good Belgian chocolate around (my preference), anything chocolate is always better than anything could have been in the South in the ‘50s and ‘60s.  So I knew the sauce would be really good, I just needed to figure out how to duplicate the wonderful texture.

Something in my experience made me think of sweetened condensed milk, that mainstay of the dessert kitchen in the South and also much of the Americas.  Canned milk products caught on quickly in many climates where fresh dairy products were hard to find and hard to hold.  And they still give just the right texture and flavor to traditional favorites.  The combination of semisweet chocolate and unsweetened chocolate below is just right for my taste.  You might vary the proportions, or use 9 ounces bittersweet plus 1 ounce unsweetened, or 10 ounces extra-bittersweet (about 70% cocoa mass). 

So next Monday night when we reach the end of our class and help ourselves to ice cream, toasted nuts, strawberries macerated in Grand Marnier (our bow to adulthood), vanilla-scented whipped cream, and a dark and luscious chocolate sauce, at least one of us will be transported to a time and place when hot summer days were impossibly long and hot fudge sundaes tasted impossibly good.

 

Hot Fudge Sauce

about 2 ½ cups

 

8 ounces semisweet chocolate, chopped

2 ounces unsweetened chocolate, chopped

2 ounces butter

½ cup sweetened condensed milk

½ cup hot coffee, approximately

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

 

            Place chocolates and butter into a stainless steel bowl over a pan of hot water.  Stir until smooth.  Stir in remaining ingredients until smooth.  Thin with more hot coffee if desired.  Use warm.

 

 

 

 

           As promised, here are further musings on caramel, milk caramel in particular.   There is something so appealing about the golden look, the warm, toasty smell; so many foods are enhanced by careful, gentle burning.  Some are even burned more violently, like the glossy bronzed sugar layer on top of crème brûlée, or the grill marks on a fine steak.  Don’t forget Paul Prudhomme’s blackened redfish, which took ‘80s America by storm (and nearly wiped out redfish, too).  But I digress.
           Some rich custardy sweets depend upon burned sugar, particularly the crème brûlée already mentioned and crème (renversée au) caramel – flan.  You might also pour a layer of caramel into the bottom of your mold for panna cotta.  As the mixture chills and sets, even without baking, the hygroscopic (hydrophilic) properties of sugar creations in general and caramel in particular will pull moisture from the milk mixture just as with flan and create a translucent golden syrup.  By the way, I make an extraordinary flan with a bit of cream cheese in it, a concept from the Yucatán called Flan Napolitano.  Please let me know if you are interested and I will be happy to post the recipe.
           Add cream to burned sugar, stir over heat until the caramel dissolves into the cream, and you have a caramel sauce.  Brown sugar gives flavor to many milky creations – even butterscotch pudding – and the molasses and caramel color that turn white sugar into brown sugar are the flavoring agents.
           Not so long before Kraft rolled out its 1933 creation and added a new word to the American vocabulary – carmel – Louis-Camille Maillard published (in 1912) a paper with some information about protein that the rest of the world might not have thought too much about.  Everyone knew that when you throw a steak on a hot grill or turn a chicken on a spit over a healthy fire, they brown.  And cooks knew that when you burn sugar over high heat it passes first through a series of ever-darker brown states that are delicious until the later stages become bitter tasting. 
           Maillard noticed that while sugar caramelizes at 338°F (170°C), and that the steak and the chicken are at high heat too, it is possible to boil milk and sugar together and get browning too, even if the temperature never passes 240°F, the soft ball!  Dried and processed milk products also tend to brown when they are stored in a warm place, a serious consideration for infant formulas because of the nutritional changes that accompany the flavor and color change.  So what is happening here?  It is a complex reaction now called the Maillard Effect or Maillard browning, whereby a combination of protein and sugar in the right proportions and with comparatively little heat will go through the chemical and nutritional changes that produce, among other reactions, that wonderful toasty aroma and flavor. 
           Is it caramel?  No, not really.  Do we care?  Dulce de leche (cajeta, manjar blanco, arquipe) is still darkly delicious however it got that way.  I will just mention here that the Maillard Effect occurs more readily in alkaline mixtures, which seems to be why dulce de leche recipes generally include sodium bicarbonate.  I had always thought that the added alkalinity would protect the milk from curdling as the pH shifts toward acidic with caramelization.  Now I know that there is no true caramelization happening here, but Maillard browning has very much the same results.          
           Working with a slightly different formula and no bicarb this time, you can create your own soft “caramel”.  Whatever it really is, it will be buttery and wonderful, and far more tempting than anything Kraft makes!  I answered the caramel call this spring for my chocolate, pecan, caramel bunnies in the Easter line at bruce’s best.  The caramel – and the bunnies – turned out even better than I had hoped, and I will be looking for other excuses to use this treat in future.  There are three basic approaches – fresh cream, evaporated milk, and condensed milk.  I find the condensed milk version very easy and irresistible.  This basic formula originally came from a professional recipe book, and I have misplaced the attribution.  I will post it later if I can dig it up.   

Soft Caramel

             1 cup water
             18 ounces – about 2 1/3 cups – sugar
             One 14-ounce can sweetened condensed milk
             1 ¼ cups – 10 fluid ounces, 15 ounces by weight – light corn syrup
             7 ounces butter
             ½ teaspoon salt
             2 teaspoons vanilla extract            Combine in a wide, heavy-bottomed saucepan the water, sugar, condensed milk, and corn syrup.  Stir over medium heat until sugar is dissolved, then bring the mixture to 230

°F, stirring often.  Stir in the butter and stir constantly until the mixture reaches 240°.  This temperature will yield a nice, gooey caramel after it cools.  You may also continue to 243°F for a slightly firmer result that might hold its shape better.  Stir in the salt and vanilla.
             Scrape the mixture onto a buttered pan to cool.  While it is still warm you may pipe it with a pastry bag or squeeze bottle.  When it has cooled to room temperature it will cut with a knife or wire.  Wrap airtight and refrigerate, but return it to room temperature to work with it, and for eating, too.
                                         
                                                            

 

          As soon as I began to think about producing chocolate truffles, I knew that dulce de leche would be one of the flavors.  There is something so irresistible about caramel in general and milk caramel in particular, that I just knew it would work with chocolate.         
         I came to this fascination with dulce nearly twenty years ago when I began to learn about the traditional foods of Mexico.  Josefina Howard – creator of Rosa Mexicano restaurant – was my mentor, and her infectious devotion to all things Mexican sparked something in me that grew into a passion.  It was from Mrs. Howard I learned that Mexico has a rich colonial candy tradition.  A few of these specialties may be an acquired taste, like the very tart balls of tamarind paste generously dusted with a beautiful hot red chile powder.  But most are instantly inviting, including perhaps my most favorite, a whole lime that has been slit open, poached in a sugar syrup, then stuffed with shredded coconut.         
         In Mexico, dulce de leche is a brown sugar fudge, which is molded and extruded into a variety of appealing shapes – buttons, crowns, logs, whole walnuts – often garnished with pecans or Mexico’s glorious little pink pine nuts, and sometimes dusted with cinnamon.  In all its forms it is irresistible.  But then there is the other kind of dulce, which is another matter altogether.  The milk caramel that other Latinos call dulce de leche (or manjar blanco or even arquipe in some parts of the Americas) in Mexico is called cajeta, or more specifically, cajeta de leche de cabra, for it is indeed traditionally made from goat’s milk.  The word cajeta comes from caja – box – because this confection was sold in charming wooden boxes, like miniature hatboxes crafted from thin shavings of soft wood.  Through the 1990s it was still possible to find cajeta in boxes, at least at the famous, elegant old candy store Dulceria Celaya, in Mexico City right in the heart of the Centro Historico.         
         Now, sadly, the boxes seem to have disappeared, though cajeta is still very much available, and just as irresistible.  Mexicans have their choice of cajeta in the jar at the supermarket or local bodega – for home deserts and quick snacks – and various cajeta creations including some wonderful sandwiches.  The commercial one is cajeta spread between two wafer paper rounds – obleas, like the host in Catholic communion.  These are called Sevillanas, and are available wherever snacks are sold, in the familiar wrapper with the painting of the flirty (though chaste, of course) girls from Seville.  In public markets and street fairs, and all the other places that Mexicans hawk their wares, expect to find at least one vendor selling rather large round obleas in pastel colors that are folded in half with a cajeta center and often a crenellation of green pumpkin seeds peeking out all along the half-round edge.  There is an exquisite beauty to these creations that moves me deeply, but that is a story I will explore another time.         
         When I first set out to create a dulce de leche chocolate truffle for bruce’s best, I settled for a cow’s milk dulce made in Florida.  It is delicious, but it lacks the slight goaty tang of fine cajeta (and it contains potassium sorbate, an additive that nearly everyone considers harmless, though an artificial preservative none the less).  After searching in vain for a Mexican product even remotely affordable in the quantities I need (Coronado brand is perfect, but pricey by the gallon), I suddenly realized there was no good reason why I could not make it myself.         
         The process is simplicity itself.  You merely simmer together milk and sugar and little else, stirring often, until you have produced a thick, rich brown caramel.  Patience is a prerequisite.  The results are sublime.  There is an elemental satisfaction to be derived from crafting such a simple, legendary substance.  I will write again about caramel, probably often.  I never mentioned the Maillard Effect.  I will get to it in future, for those who are interested.  For now, I will post these thoughts and hope that I have stirred up caramel dreams along with my cajeta.