About a year ago, well I guess it was more around Christmas time last year, my parents and I met some of our extended family in New York City. We spent the day walking around and ended up at Saks Fifth Avenue. On the 8th floor of Saks is a chocolate shop where they make delicious truffles and assorted chocolates. Since it was during the holiday season they were also giving out free samples and we tried some of their sea salt caramels. They were delicious. So good in fact that we talked about them for months and months. Finally, in April, I went back to Saks to buy more for my mother, but they were gone. Apparently they were only a limited time only item, so we continued our longing for sea salt caramels. That is until my mother came across this recipe online! Imagine our excitement! At last the elusive sea salt caramel would be ours!
6 tbsp butter, cut into small pieces
1 lb bittersweet chocolate
Prepare an 8 inch pan by lining it with aluminum foil and spraying the foil with nonstick cooking spray. Place the cream in a large saucepan over medium-high heat and bring it to a boil. Stir in the sugar, corn syrup and honey and stir until it begins to boil. Periodically wipe down the sides of the pan with a pastry brush dipped in water to prevent sugar crystals from forming. Cook the candy, stirring occasionally, until it reaches 257 degrees on a candy thermometer. remove the pan from the heat immediately and stir in the butter, vanilla, and 2 tsp of salt. Pour into prepared pan and let set at room temperature until firm enough to cut. Cut the caramel into small squares or strips with a chef's knife. Temper the chocolate and dip the caramels in the chocolate on at a time. Place them on a baking sheet covered with waxed paper or foil to set while chocolate is still wet, sprinkle on the remaining salt and allow to set completely.
There are a couple of things that we did differently than this recipe says to do. First, make sure your foil is well greased. We had a lot of trouble removing ours with a light coat of oil. Second, instead of buying bar chocolate and chopping it up and tempering it, which is kind of a long complicated process of melting your chocolate at an exact temperature, we bought Ghirardelli semi-sweet chips and melted them in the microwave. This was much easier and worked perfectly. We also put our caramel overnight in the refrigerator so that it really set well and was cold going into the warm chocolate. Third, when dipping your caramels use a fork! It allows you to pick up your caramel and let the excess chocolate drip away.
Now in reality, these are not true caramels. You're not caramelizing sugar. It's really just a mixture with the same properties as caramel and I think that if we were to do this recipe again we would make authentic caramel and just dip that. These caramels, although good with the right texture and consistency, kind of have a strong honey flavor which is not what I expect with a caramel. If I were to try this recipe again I would also not use the sea salt in the actual mixture because the large salt chunks sank mostly to the bottom of the mixture, which on some of the caramels resulted in a completely salt bottom crust. This wasn't really noticeable in the taste once dipped in chocolate, but if you want them to be uniform and pleasant looking that's a change I would recommend.
One thing that we did that I would not do again is instead of putting our dipped caramels on wax paper we put them on a wire rack. We thought that this would help us avoid having our caramels sit in pools of chocolate. Instead the excess chocolate would drip off through the rack. Well, because the caramels were warmed by the chocolate they began to melt right through the rack and when they set and hardened we had to cut, pry and scrape them off the racks. Unless you have a rack with very small holes stick to the waxed paper or a silicon mat and just cut away your extra chocolate once hardened.
As for the shoot, because it's chocolate I had to work fast. I got my set and lighting done first. I knew it was going to be a tight, close up shot because the chocolates are small and I really wanted to use this golden rod paper I had because I thought that would look really nice with the chocolate brown. Once I was set up it was time for the chocolates which I kept in the refrigerator up until that point. I had also put a metal fork in the freezer to use as a tool to move around and touch my chocolates once I got them on set. I wanted to have the least amount of skin contact with them to avoid melting. I topped them with their sea salt and put them on set. I did have a little trouble with melting and sweating chocolate at the end, but I'm happy with the shots. They're sunny and airy and I think the chocolate looks good.
