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Dessert

Chocolate Caramels

A confection made by boiling chocolate, sugar, cream, and cream of tartar until the crack stage, then poured into pans.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Chocolate Caramels

Ingredients

Directions

Make the caramel

  1. Dissolve the chocolate in a saucepan with the water.

  2. Add the sugar, cream, and cream of tartar.

  3. Boil and stir slowly, cooking until it reaches the crack stage.

Set

  1. When done, pour into buttered pans and mark off into squares.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Chocolate + creamtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Chocolate + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Provides the bulk of the sweetness and, once cooked, the firm caramel structure.
Chocolate
Adds chocolate flavor and deepens the color of the caramel.
Cream
Adds fat and moisture, giving the caramels a softer, richer texture.
Cream of tartar
Acidity helps prevent sugar from crystallizing, keeping the caramel smooth.

The step that matters

Cooking to the crack stage. Caramel sets according to how much water has evaporated, so cooking to the crack stage determines firmness. Stirring slowly and keeping the sugar from crystallizing keeps the texture smooth. Too short a cook yields soft, sticky caramels; too long yields hard ones.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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