Stuffed Peppers and Caramel Sauce


Don't be alarmed, the caramel sauce is not on top of the peppers or anything I just decided to do two recipes for this entry. Since there is not a terrible amount of interesting information on stuffed peppers I thought I would add the next recipe on my list to this entry.

Stuffed peppers are exactly what they sound like. I had only ever had them at the university cafeteria, and they were okay, nothing too special. Mine weren't really all that exciting either, but still pretty good. Since I am doing my best to follow the recipes I had to make a choice between cheese and rice for the filling or ground beef and vegetables. I went with the rice and cheese version although I really would have liked to do a combination of the two recipes. Something for next time I guess. One thing I would recommend, that I think the cafeteria may have skipped on, is steaming the peppers for 10 minutes before putting them in the oven. This way they are tender instead of hard and crunchy. One last note for fans of this blog yes that is another gratin on top of the peppers, they seem to be popping up everywhere.

I have committed to full disclosure on this blog so I will come out and say it... my caramel sauce was a disaster. I had made caramel a couple of times before without a recipe and I had no problems, so I was surprised this didn't work out. First a little about the recipe, basically caramel is sugar and water but this recipe from Good Eats: The Early Years had two other ingredients in the main caramel. The addition of cream of tartar and corn syrup is to prevent re-crystallization. WARNING this may bring back nightmares from high school chemistry. Dissolving the sugar, which is almost pure sucrose, into the water creates a solution. A given amount of water can only dissolve a certain amount of sugar, when a solution reaches this point it is saturated. When heated though the solution can dissolve more sugar, becoming supersaturated, but at a price. Any sudden movements can send the sucrose out of solution and you have to start again. This kind of thing does happen to supersaturated solutions as I found out in high school chemistry when I spilled a supersaturated solution on my pants. It definitely re-crystallizes, but that's another story. Adding the cream of tartar, an acid, breaks down some of the sucrose into its base parts glucose and fructose. These other sugars get in the way of the sucrose reforming into crystals. The corn syrup does the same thing because it is mostly glucose. When I had made caramel before I had never run into problems with crystallization, so these extra ingredients may not be necessary.

"Finished" sauce

Weird separated caramel sauce

Since I don't have a candy thermometer I just had to guess my caramel's temperature. Ideally it should be between 320 and 360 fahrenheit. Its basically a game of chicken between you and the molten sugar. Add the cream to cool it off too early and you lose lots of caramel flavour but go to long and it will burn. Had I added the cream to mine about 5 seconds earlier it probably would have been okay; it was only slightly burned. It you have ever burned something (I think we can all say that we have) a little bit of burnt flavour goes a long way! To had to the list of problems when I added the cream to the caramel it curdled, leaving a very rough texture. Once cooled it even separated from the rest of the caramel. This is bizarre, the recipe said to just dump all the cream in at once which is what I did. I can't figure out what went wrong. I will have to try this again sometime and not burn it before I can really make a judgement on the recipe.

Caramel Sauce Recipe