Cooking 101

There is a television commercial campaign that annoys me to no end. It revolves around a certain brand of chocolate bar that has a creamy caramel filling. For some reason they think that getting caramel inside a chocolate bar is some type of secret. That is why for the game I had a CarmaChoc bar and in this episode the player needs to make one.

The first thing needed to make a chocolate bar is chocolate. This comes from the cacao beans. These beans are fermented and then roasted, then crushed to get at the nibs. The nibs are then crushed forming cocoa powder and cocoa butter. To make eating chocolate, the cocoa is combined with flavorings, sugar, and some of the cocoa butter through a process called conching. Finally it is tempered. Yes, this is a lot of work which is now taken for granted.

Thankfully chocolate is readily available for cooking so all that is necessary is to melt it down and mold it into the desired shape.

Caramel is produced by heating sugar to 340ºF/170ºC in a process called caramelization. Sugar comes from the sugar cane (though you can also get it from sugar beets). Essentially, the liquid from the cane is squeezed out of the plant and boiled until crystals start forming. The molasses is removed leaving you with sugar. When heat is applied things start happening at the molecular level. Sugar is being broken down into smaller molecules and combining with oxygen. A lot of flavor is being added as a result, but at this temperature sugar is incredibly close to its burning point. In the words of Alton Brown, "This is not good eats!"

There are two core techniques for making caramel. The dry methods and the wet methods. The game uses a dry method as I didn't want an extra step in the solution, especially since it could be skipped and still result in caramel.

The dry method is simply applying heat to sugar until it caramelizes. This has the advantage of being really fast but since the caramelization point is close to the burning point often results in burnt caramel. One technique, used in crème brûlée is to use a blowtorch on the sugar.

The vastly easier way of making caramel is the wet method. This requires adding water to the sugar. While this takes longer, it also reduces the speed of caramelization giving you a much greater margin of error.

Turning caramelized sugar into a caramel sauce simply requires adding butter and cream/milk. This should be done while stirring rapidly, otherwise the sugar will recrystallize. Granted, if it does recrystallize you can just warm up the cream until the crystals melt but if you heat the cream up too much it starts breaking up into its separate parts resulting in a less desirable sauce. You now have more than enough information to solve this episode. If you find the science behind cooking interesting, I recommend you take a look at Alton Brown's Good Eats books and TV series.