Welcome to the summary page for FabulousFusionFood's Cook's Guide entry for Caramel along with all the recipes employing Caramel presented on this site, with 165 recipes in total.

This is a continuation of an entire series of pages that will, I hope, allow my visitors to better navigate this site. As well as displaying recipes by name, country and region of origin I am now planning a whole series of pages where recipes can be located by meal type and main ingredient. This page gives a listing of all the Caramel recipes added to this site.

These recipes, all contain Caramel as a major wild food ingredient.

Simply put, caramel is sugar heated until it forms a toffee. Caramel is generally made by slowly heating sugar at approximately 170°C so that the sugar molecules melt and break down into other volatile compounds that give it the characteristic caramel colour and flavours. Dependent on the length of cooking and the starting sugars caramel can bear any colour from light beige to dark brown and generally has a sweet, toasted, flavour.

As the sugars in anything can be caramelized, and the term is also often applied to onions and other vegetables when they are fried slowly so that they brown all over. Sometimes the term is also applied to meat when it's pan-fried to colour the outside.

For fruit-based desserts, particularly those using peaches, apples, pears and plums a caramel of butter and sugar may be formed in which the fruit is cooked. Such caramel-glazed fruit can be served as they are, or they can be used as a base for other dishes. Steamed puddings also have a caramel topping made from a butter, water and sugar blend on top of which the sponge pudding is spooned before being steamed.