Some time back, we did a talk on how to make homemade butter. We have since discovered that a little machine is a wonderful tool. You can make butter in minutes with the machine but it is still good to know how to make butter by hand. These skills give you more ways to become more self-sufficient.

Now we move onto making your own caramel from the leftover whey from butter making. This is a fairly easy but time-consuming process. It only takes a few ingredients and some patience. If you have read the piece on homemade butter making or if you have tried it for yourself, we hope you have done both, you know there is whey leftover. The whey is the whitish liquid left after you separate the butterfat from the whole milk. Up till a bit ago, we were saving the leftover whey to put on the dog’s food, they love it. But then one of the older folks asked if we used it to make caramel sauce. I am sure, I had that “deer in the headlights” look. I did not even know you could do that. So after a very informative talk with an elder, we have the below recipe to make caramel sauce from the leftover whey when we make butter.

To make your own caramel sauce with your leftover whey you will need:

2 quarts of whey

1 1/2 cup sugar

4 oz cooking butter

1/4 cup lemon juice

If you are like us, we do not always come up with the perfect outcome when making homemade items. We just roll with it and use what we have.

If you do not get 2 quartz leftovers, you can half the recipe for 1 quart.

1-quart whey

3/4 cup sugar

2 oz butter

1/8 cup lemon juice

How to:

In a saucepan, to hold either the 2 quarts or 1-quart whey that you have plus some spare room put the whey on to cook. It is best to cook on low or medium so you do not scald or burn the whey as it cooks. At this point, I should point out that it will take a good while up to several hours or so, for the whey to cook down. Make sure to stir often to keep it from burning to the bottom of the pan.

While cooking down, add the lemon juice and keep stirring. The lemon juice will add a bit of acid to the whey and help keep it from crystallizing and giving you grainy caramel.

Once your 2 quartz had cooked down to about 1 quart, you will add the rest of the ingredients. This does take some time.

Add the butter and stir to melt and mix.

Add the sugar, stir until it is all dissolved and mixed.

At this point, turn the heat up to medium.

Be sure to watch and stir, your whey will heat up and start to boil. You want a nice, soft, slow boil, not a wild bubbling. Keep watch and stir.

It usually takes an hour or so to get to the next stage but do not wander off or it will burn.

Slowly, almost unnoticeable, your mixture will get darker and thicker. Be sure to stir so it does not boil over, that is a mess to clean up. This is where the old saying, “a watched pot never boils” comes from, I am sure.

You can test your caramel by stirring and then looking at the mixture drops as they run off the spatula. If it drips off like corn syrup you are there, if it runs off like water, keep at it.

Once you get the color and thickness you want, turn off the stove and let it cool a bit. The caramel will thicken up a bit as it cools.

Once cool enough to handle, put your new caramel into a bottle or container you have ready.

We had several things going on the day we made our caramel out of leftover whey, so there was some lag time in between the watching and stirring parts. We got a wonderful tasting caramel with a bit of a grainy texture. It was not perfect but it was very good.

If you are going to use it immediately, you can use it hot or wait a bit longer and use it when it is cooled. If you are making it for later, put your caramel into the fridge, it will last about 2 weeks. Ours does not stay around long enough to go bad. If you leave it on the counter or table it will go bad rather quickly, as there are no preservatives in your homemade caramel. If you put it in the fridge, you can use reheat or microwave it when you are ready to use your caramel.

This recipe makes are great flavor and a nice, sauce that you can pour on ice cream, cakes, or pretty much anything that you want caramel on. This will not be the hard icing caramel like you see on caramel cakes. To make that you will need more ingredients and a different cooking method. We may get to that in another talk.

As you can see we made some awesome caramel crescent rolls. A little caramel brushed inside before the wrap-up and then more caramel brushed on the tops. Ok, so roll wrapping is not everyone’s talent.

We hope you will try your hand at both homemade butter and homemade caramel. Once you have had homemade, you will never want to use that store-bought stuff again.

Thank you for visiting and please come again for another edition of Out Standing in the Field.