O Caramel!

I once had a love affair with caramel.

Plunging into the romance with the recklessness only a child would dare, I stuffed my mouth with the sticky goop until my cheeks bulged out and savored the sweet buttery taste even as I worked frantically to get the thick strands unstuck from my teeth.

(Sigh.) I imagine there’s a chorus of orthodontists out there giving thanks that I never had braces.

In those years it was all about candy, not pies or cakes. And who even knew about crazy desserts like crème brulee or tiramisu? By far my favorite candy bar was the Caravelle, which had chocolate, the sort of crispy rice bits now found only in Nestlé’s Crunch, and, of course, caramel—most of the pre-adolescent food groups. It was perhaps the pinnacle of American candy-making. Milky Ways were okay too as were Snickers but the peanuts tended to overwhelm everything else in the latter. As for Three Musketeers, I didn’t even know what nougat was but I knew it wasn’t caramel.

When PeterPaul, nee Cadbury, stopped making the Caravelle, my love went bad. I tried to enjoy the $100,000 Bar (now called 100 Grand), but it wasn’t the same. Almond Roca was good but it was more crunch than chew. At my lowest ebb, I was even tempted by the loose caramels Safeway kept near the produce, but it just felt wrong.

If only I were a Canadian.

Really.

The gold standard for caramel, or golden brown standard to be precise, was Mackintosh’s Toffee which was only to be found in the provinces. My mom, of all people, was the one who turned the family on to this stuff. Every time she went off to Vancouver or the family station wagon took us all north of the border, we got a small fix of it, enough to bring on a smile, but not an addiction.

It came in a red rectangular box with a wide strip of blue-green Scottish tartan wrapped around its middle. It was delicious, but eating it required a certain amount of skill. It came in as a large bar that had to be shattered before you could eat it. Try to bite a piece off and you’d get long strands of toffee streaming from your hand to your mouth.

Sadly, Nestle, the actual manufacturers of the Mackintosh bar stopped producing it some time ago. I am not alone in mourning this fact.

As a kind of tribute, however, I decided to make Toffee ice cream this week. It’s not Mackintosh toffee by any means. (I got the toffee recipe from the Joy of Cooking.) Even so, the ice cream turned out phenomenally well. My kids loved it. My wife loved it. Even my in-laws and their teenage son loved it.

It doesn’t quite recapture the lost passion of my youth, but happily that enthusiasm is alive and well in my imagination and probably part of my palate as well.

Pecan Toffee Ice Cream
(about 2 quarts)
1 ½ cups milk
¾ cup sugar
2 T flour
A few grains salt
2 eggs or 3 yolks (pasteurized, if possible, see note)
Pecan Toffee

1 ½ cups pecans, chopped
5 T unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
½ cup packed light brown sugar
2 T honey
1 T milk
⅛ t salt

1 t vanilla

1 ½ cup cream
1 t vanilla

1. Blend milk with sugar, flour and salt, and heat to 180-190ºF stirring frequently until thick, cover for 10 minutes.
2. Beat eggs and add ½ cup of mixture while beating, then add eggs to mixture.

HEALTH NOTE:     Since you’re dealing with eggs here, you need to take care when cooking the custard. Too much cooking and the custard gets lumpy, too little and you risk salmonella.  Another alternative is to use pasteurized eggs.

1. Heat the mixture for one minute over medium, then cool with plastic wrap or wax paper pressed onto the top of the mixture to keep it from developing a skin. Cool for several hours or overnight.
2. To make toffee:
   1. Toast pecans in a 350 °F oven for 5-7 minutes, cool, then chop into small pieces.
   2. Place butter, brown sugar, honey, milk and salt in a heavy, medium-sized saucepan and bring the mixture to a boil, stirring frequently.
   3. Continue stirring and boil the mixture for 3 minutes.
   4. Remove from heat, stir in pecans and vanilla and spread the mixture out on a sheet pan lined with parchment or wax paper to cool.
   5. When toffee is hard, remove it from the sheet pan and break into small pieces (I balled mine up in the parchment and crushed it to bits with a hammer.)
   6. Add the cream, vanilla and crushed toffee to the cooled custard mix and freeze.
   7. Put the frozen ice cream in the freezer for a couple of hours to give it the chance to firm up.

NOTE:     When freezing ice cream, you need to use an ice cream freezer to ensure that a certain amount of air is mixed into the frozen cream. This gives it a lighter, less icy consistency. When freezing sorbet, you may also freeze it in a popsicle mold, a bowl or on a sheet pan. Be sure to stir the mixture occasionally to limit the size of the ice particles. Larger chunks of ice make for granita, miniscule chunks make for a nice smooth sorbet (an ice cream freezer is ideal).

Photo Credit: “O Caramel,” inspired by a number of tasty images. 

Uh oh. I’ve just outed myself as half Canadian. I wonder which half gets universal health care, the same half that’s excruciatingly polite. If I could get someone to start making Mackintosh Toffee bars again, you could call me whatever you like. Oh heck, you can call me that right now in the comments section. Within the bounds of decorum, of course.