The sweet escape

So, because that last one could not have been more serious in tone if I'd tried, I decided to put something a little lighter in content up today...lighter in tone, at least. Calories and saturated fat, not so much. Today, we're making dulce de leche.

Dulce de leche is a delightfully gooey milk caramel that goes with about anything down here, barring the obvious - I have, for example, never seen anyone eat dulce de leche with their asado. Yet. It's everywhere else, though - the filling for pastries and cookies, on top of ice cream, smeared on bananas. I've even seen it eaten straight out of the tub with a spoon...and perhaps have done so myself. You can buy jars of it in the supermarket like we buy peanut butter.

Before our end-of-year retreat, I decided to end the year in the most Rioplatense of ways and make homemade dulche de leche the old-school Uruguayan grandma way. It turned out pretty good, too...here's what you do.

You'll need:
2 liters of whole milk (about a half-gallon...you could use 2%, 1%, or skim, but this is a Lutheran recipe - sin boldly)
500 grams of sugar (about 1 lb...again, sin boldly)
a dash of vanilla
1 teaspoon of sodium bicarbonate (you can leave this out, as I did, but it's supposed to help with the color and consistency)

Put the milk in a large pot over medium-high heat. Add the sugar; stir until it dissolves. Add the vanilla and (if you're using it) the sodium bicarbonate. Bring the mixture up to a good strong boil and let it cook down, stirring frequently. It will, eventually (be patient, and bring a book), begin to condense down into a light-to-medium brown goo - once it starts thickening and caramelizing, it is vital to keep stirring it, making sure to scrape the bottom; otherwise, you'll end up with burned dulce de leche and one honey of a mess to clean up. Once it reaches a nice, very gooey consistency (i.e. the whole batch is at a gel state and neither liquid nor solid), pull it off the heat, let it sit and cool off, then jar it up, stick it in the fridge to finish cooling off, and enjoy it on toast, bananas, cookies, pastries, or on its own.