Caramel au Beurre Salé

the salted butter caramel of Brittany: sugar taken to a dark amber dry caramel, stopped with hot cream, and finished with a great deal of salted Breton butter and a pinch of fleur de sel

Origin: France

From the journey of Sugar Cane.

Nantes and Bordeaux were the great French sugar ports, and their wealth was built on the same triangle as Bristol's and Liverpool's: ships out to the Guinea coast, enslaved people across to the Antilles, and sugar home. Nantes alone fitted out something like half of all French slaving voyages, and Saint-Domingue at its height supplied two-fifths of the world's sugar to refineries along the Loire and the Gironde. What that cheap sugar met in Brittany was the other great local product, salted butter. Brittany salted its butter because the province was exempt from the gabelle, the punishing salt tax that applied across most of the kingdom, so Breton butter was salted where French butter elsewhere was not, and it remains so. The marriage of the two is caramel au beurre salé, generally credited to the Quiberon confectioner Henri Le Roux, who put his salted butter caramel on sale in 1977 and won a prize for it at the Paris salon in 1980, since when it has spread from Brittany across France and beyond. Its principle is that salt and dairy fat suppress the cloying quality of pure sugar and let you taste the caramel itself, which is why a properly salted caramel tastes less sweet than an unsalted one made with the same sugar.

Ingredients

  • 200 g caster sugar
  • 200 ml double cream
  • 120 g salted Breton butter (demi-sel), cubed and at room temperature
  • 1 tsp fleur de sel, plus a little more to finish
  • 1 tsp vanilla extract (optional)

Method

  1. Warm the cream in a small pan until it is steaming but not boiling, and keep it hot beside the hob. Have the butter cubed and ready.
  2. Scatter a thin layer of the sugar over the base of a heavy, wide, pale-bottomed saucepan and set over a medium heat. As it melts at the edges, add the rest in two or three additions, swirling the pan rather than stirring.
  3. Cook until the sugar is entirely melted and has darkened to the colour of an old copper penny, with the first wisps of smoke rising. This takes 6 to 9 minutes.
  4. Take the pan off the heat, stand back, and pour in the hot cream in a steady stream, whisking as you go. It will bubble up furiously and may seize; keep whisking and return it to a low heat until smooth.
  5. Off the heat, whisk in the butter a few cubes at a time until fully emulsified and glossy, then the fleur de sel and the vanilla if using. Cool for 10 minutes, pour into a jar, and finish with a small extra pinch of salt.

Notes

Genuine Breton beurre demi-sel carries about three per cent salt and gives the authentic result; unsalted butter with an extra half-teaspoon of fine salt is a reasonable substitute. Fleur de sel from Guérande, on the same Breton coast, is traditional and its coarse flakes are meant to be detectable rather than dissolved. The caramel keeps for a month in a sealed jar in the refrigerator and firms to a spreadable paste when cold; stand the jar in warm water to loosen it. Use it on crêpes and kouign-amann, over vanilla ice cream, folded into buttercream, or as the filling for caramels mous, the soft chewy sweets sold in every Breton confectioner, for which the same mixture is boiled on to 118°C and poured into a lined tray to set before cutting.

The Gastrographer

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