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. (more…)