a food product used both as a brown colouring and for its bitter-sweet flavour, is produced in the final stage of sugar boiling when sugar is heated above 170 °C (340 °F). The exact temperature at which caramel begins to form depends on the composition of the sugar; the figure given applies to sucrose, common white sugar. The fructose present in honey caramelizes more quickly; but the dextrose (glucose) which is also present in honey is slower. The pentose sugars found in small amounts in various vegetables caramelize particularly well, and toast made from wholemeal bread owes its dark colour to the caramelization of pentoses in the wheat bran.
The formation of caramel is, as a matter of chemistry, very complex. Some of the reactions take in oxygen, but others release it; so the process can go on in a closed container, which ordinary burning cannot. As the sugars are degraded they are changed into over a hundred different compounds, some of which are brown and bitter. If the temperature rises much above caramelization point, or is maintained at it for too long, the taste becomes too bitter and the colour very dark. At a very high temperature the sugar burns to black carbon.
The caramel topping in desserts such as crème brûlée is made by exposing a layer of sugar on the surface to direct heat, e.g. under a grill.
Caramel colouring has several uses. An old-fashioned product still sometimes met is gravy browning, a concentrated caramel syrup which can be made at home from sugar and water. (It serves only to add colour, whereas stock cubes or ‘gravy mixes’, which also often contain caramel, provide both colour and flavour.) Caramel colouring made from corn syrup is used to tint many brown foods, including bottled brown sauces and some drinks.
Caramel is used extensively in confectionery. Barley sugar (which formerly contained barley, but now does not) is simply sugar which has been slightly caramelized and then abruptly cooled to solidify it to a glassy state. See also praline, spun sugar, and toffee apple.
However, the word is more familiar in a confectionery context as meaning a kind of toffee. Caramels and toffee are based on similar recipes, using sugar syrup enriched with milk, butter, or cream, and the choice of name for a particular confection in this category may appear arbitrary. This is recognized by confectioners, and stated in Skuse's Complete Confectioner (13th edn, 1957):
The difference between toffee and caramel is essentially one of texture and the two types of confection merge into one another without any clear dividing line. Toffee should be hard, ‘chewy’, unlike butterscotch which is hard and brittle; caramel is soft-eating with a clean fracture.
‘Caramel’ sweets made with milk owe their flavour and colour to a different effect which has been named ‘Strecker degradation’. This occurs in heated milk when the sugar and protein in it react together. The effect is also noticeable in condensed and evaporated milk, and in the aroma of various roasted products including cocoa.
Alan Davidson was a distinguished author and publisher, and one of the world's best-known writers on fish and fish cookery. In 1975 he retired early from the diplomatic service—after serving in, among other places, Washington, Egypt, Tunisia, and Laos, where he was British Ambassador—to pursue a fruitful second career as a food historian and food writer extraordinaire. Among his popular books are Seafood of South-East Asia, North Atlantic Seafood, and Mediterranean Seafood. In 2003, shortly before his death, he was awarded the Erasmus Prize for his contribution to European culture.
