Browning

the burnt sugar of the Caribbean kitchen: cane sugar taken past caramel to the point of smoking and almost black, then stopped with boiling water, and used to colour stews, rice, and the Christmas cake

Origin: Trinidad and Tobago

From the journey of Sugar Cane.

Burning sugar is the foundational technique of the Anglophone Caribbean kitchen, and it is one of the clearest places where the region's several inheritances meet. The method of starting a dish by caramelising sugar in hot oil until it darkens, then browning meat in it, is West African, carried across in the slave ships; the sugar it uses was the product of the estates on which those ships landed; and it was applied, on the sugar colonies of Trinidad and British Guiana, to the rice and the split peas that came with the indentured Indian labourers who replaced enslaved workers after 1838. The result is pelau, and beyond it the brown stew chicken, the stew beef, and the oxtail of the whole region. What is happening chemically is that the sugar is taken well past the point of ordinary caramel, past golden and amber and into a dark, smoking, bitter stage at which almost all the sweetness has been destroyed and what remains is colour and a deep, roasted, faintly acrid savour. The nerve required is the whole skill: stop too early and the dish is sweet and pallid, go a few seconds too far and it is irredeemably bitter. Bottled as browning, it is sold in every Caribbean grocery and used to colour black cake, but the home-made version made minutes before it is used is a different and better thing.

Ingredients

  • 200 g dark brown sugar or demerara sugar
  • 250 ml boiling water
  • 1 pinch fine sea salt

Method

  1. Have the boiling water measured and standing beside the hob before you begin, and open a window. Put the sugar in a dry, heavy, deep saucepan over a medium heat.
  2. Let the sugar melt without stirring, swirling the pan occasionally, until it is entirely liquid and pale amber. This takes 4 to 5 minutes.
  3. Now keep going, well past the point at which instinct says to stop. The syrup will darken through amber to deep mahogany, then to near-black, and will begin to smoke steadily and smell sharp and roasted. This second stage takes 2 to 3 minutes.
  4. The moment it is the colour of strong coffee and smoking freely, take the pan off the heat, stand back, and pour in the boiling water in a steady stream. It will erupt, spit, and seize into a hard lump.
  5. Return to a low heat and stir until the seized lump has completely redissolved into a thin, smooth, very dark liquid. Add the salt, cool, and bottle.

Notes

The strength varies with how far you take the sugar, so test the first batch by stirring a few drops into a little water: it should be very dark, faintly bitter, and barely sweet. Use it to colour brown stew chicken, stew beef, oxtail, and pepperpot, and to give the Caribbean Christmas black cake its near-black crumb. For pelau, the browning is not made separately at all but in the pot: sugar is burnt directly in the hot oil and the meat goes straight in to seal in the caramel, which is why a home cook who has made browning once finds pelau far less alarming. Bottled browning is sold by Caribbean grocers and is a perfectly reasonable convenience, though it is usually thinner and sweeter. This is not the same thing as gravy browning, which is a commercial caramel colouring, nor as the caramel used in a crème caramel, which is stopped a long way earlier.

The Gastrographer

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