Making caramel is hard, but making a caramel sauce at home is surprisingly easy, taking three ingredients and just a matter of a few minutes, albeit a few minutes of paying close attention to the stove with a whisk.

I’ve got a few uses for caramel sauce and I wanted to write down my recipe so that Google can find it more easily for me next time.

Ingredients

Makes about 300g of caramel sauce

180g sugar
90g butter
135ml cream
1/2 or 1 teaspoon sea salt flakes (I’m pretty sure any pure salt will do). Use 1/2 a teaspoon if you’re serving warm or at room temperature, a full teaspoon if frozen because cold dulls the flavour.

Method

Put the sugar and butter into a pan and gently melt them together. You can also quickly melt them together, but you’ll need to whisk whilst you’re doing it, otherwise the bottom of the sugar will melt and caramelise before the butter melts which takes a bit of elbow grease to reincorporate them again.

Heat it up for a bit until it starts to darken, then mix in the cream a bit at a time. The reason you want to mix it in a bit at a time is that the cream will be cold enough to make the sugar set which would result in lumps that you’d have to melt and whisk out.

Stir in the salt, then simmer it for a couple of minutes and then pour into a jug to cool.