Toby and I have a fantastic new Vietnamese cookbook (this one), and the very first thing we made from it was caramel sauce. This is a very easy and simple sauce that goes into many, many of the book’s recipes.
You start with lots of sugar and a little water on the stove.
Let it sit and it starts to caramelize:
At the end it becomes very dark very fast! This part is exciting.
At this point you have to add back some water, so the sauce is thinner and easy to use. The author has advice for how to do it safely, since there is a lot of unpredictable bubbling when you mix water with the much hotter caramel liquid. At the end, you have a deliciously toasty sauce to use in anything! It’s like molasses, but much thinner and also lighter-tasting.
We instantly used it to cook some sole fillets. The result was subtle and delicious. The fish totally fell apart, which was not intended, but it tasted great.
