dulce de leche (v 1.0)

my love for dulce de leche started about five years ago, when nina happened to make a banoffee pie one weekend. i had heard of it (from the musical “guys and dolls”), and possibly had had it a few times, but i had never paid it much attention. now i know better; like condensed milk, i’m pretty sure i could sit on the couch like a lump and consume entire jars of it. it’s like caramel, but at once not; while caramel is more about the sugar, dulce de leche is all about the milk. somehow it’s more comforting than caramel – and that’s saying something, because i love caramel like nobody’s business. i confess that i also like the time it takes to make dulce de leche – there’s something comforting about its cooking process consisting of stirring it for hours on the stove.

you can buy dulce de leche, but many people just make it from scratch, or (more frequently) by boiling a can of condensed milk in a pot of water for four hours. supposedly, as long as you keep the can covered with water, it won’t explode all over your kitchen (and you). i’ve gone the condensed milk route, but i wanted to try making it from scratch, especially as i had a quart of whole milk on hand from yesterday’s lemon coffee cake. it takes about as long as the condensed milk takes, but with some stirring thrown in. the recipe i consulted instructed me to combine milk, sugar, and vanilla in a pot and wait for it to simmer, then stir in some baking soda. no idea what the baking soda does – maybe it thickens it? what i do know is that it gives the dulce de leche a faint acidic aftertaste – not so good. the dulce de leche experiments will continue. in my consequent google searches for “milk jam,” none of the recipes contained a trace of baking soda, so i’m going to try making this without the baking soda at all. it was also very sweet, so maybe i’ll try a version with evaporated milk. the basics of the recipes seem pretty standard, though – 1 quart milk, 1 cup sugar, 1 vanilla bean.

just to clue you in regarding the photos, the top is the ingredients in the pot, then after i had added the baking soda and it was simmering. the third photo is missing a couple of steps – first, i walked away from the pot and when i came back, the milk was boiling into a semi-solid froth, and i stirred that down and it became a lot more liquid. second, my milk jam separated into curd and whey (both caramel-colored) and so i food-processed it, per another recipe i consulted. so the third photo is when i had returned the food-processed dulce de leche, to reduce a bit further (you can see a little bit of the lumpy dulce de leche on the spatula). the fourth is to show you how thick it gets.

dulce de leche 1.0

1 quart whole milk
1c sugar
1 vanilla bean
1/2t baking soda, dissolved in 1T water

1. in a heavy-bottomed saucepan, stir together milk and sugar. split the vanilla bean; scrape the seeds out of the pod and add both to the pot. heat on medium-low until the mixture boils (if you leave the milk out and bring it to room temp, this step will take much less time).

2. remove the pan from the heat and stir in the baking soda mixture. stir until the froth subsides a little, then return to heat. simmer on medium, taking care not to let the mixture boil (turn down the heat if it boils), until the mixture has thickened a little and is a dark caramel-esque brown – give it a stir every now and then to make sure nothing’s burning.

3. transfer to a food processor or blender (there’s not quite enough of it to use an immersion blender) and process until smooth. you can return it to the pot to reduce it a bit further over low heat, or transfer to an airtight storage container and let cool before covering.

prep: 5-10 minutes
active cooking time: 3-4 hours

[makes 1 cup; stays good in the fridge for 3 months or the freezer for 1 year]