If I could pack everything I love about New York City in October — the carpet of fiery leaves on the ground from the trees I didn’t even know we had; the sky, impossibly blue; the air, drinkably crisp; the temperature finally delicious enough that it implores you to spend hours wandering around, sipping warm spiced apple cider from the greenmarkets — into one tiny square, this would be how I’d try to pull it off.
It would be impossible, of course. I mean, you can’t smell the street vendors, with roasted nuts and pretzels that, well, at least look amazing. You can’t feel the slightly irritating swish of strangers’ scarves against your arm as they hurry past you. You can’t hear the lull, the surprising hush that passes over the loudest city when the weather is unspeakably perfect.
I spent years making excuses for why I didn’t make caramels — “Bleh, too sweet!” “I’m just not a candy person!” “It’s too precise!”– but I was just avoiding it after one experience wherein I misread a recipe as 225, not 252 degrees and ended up with caramels that gummed permanently to your teeth. I had to toss the better part of a pound of chocolate into the trash. But my obsession with apple cider — and
finding desserts that really taste like it, rather than invoking it in name only — finally got me over this. I’m so glad. This is my fall bliss. The apple cider is boiled and boiled and boiled until it’s a slip of its original volume, leaving only a syrupy apple impact. The syrup is then expanded into a cinnamon-scented buttery caramel with hidden crunches of salt. They’re the most intense caramels I’ve ever eaten, the kind that demand you close your eyes and consider how you’ve managed to shrink an entire weekend of leaf-peeping upstate into a paper-wrapped treat.
Apple cider caramels
4 cups (945 ml) apple cider
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
2 teaspoons flaky sea salt
8 tablespoons (115 grams or 1 stick) unsalted butter, cut into chunks
1 cup (200 grams) granulated sugar
1/2 cup (110 grams) packed light brown sugar
1/3 cup (80 ml) heavy cream
Neutral oil for the knife
Boil the apple cider in a 3- to 4-quart saucepan over high heat until it is reduced to a dark, thick syrup, between 1/3 and 1/2 cup in volume. This takes about 35 to 40 minutes on my stove. Stir occasionally.
Meanwhile, get your other ingredients in order, because you won’t have time to spare once the candy is cooking. Line the bottom and sides of an 8-inch straight-sided square metal baking pan with 2 long sheets of crisscrossed parchment. Set it aside. Stir the cinnamon and flaky salt together in a small dish.
Once you are finished reducing the apple cider, remove it from the heat and stir in the butter, sugars, and heavy cream. Return the pot to medium-high heat with a candy thermometer attached to the side, and let it boil until the thermometer reads 252 (not 225, okay?) degrees, only about 5 minutes. Keep a close eye on it.
(Don’t have a candy or deep-fry thermometer? Have a bowl of very cold water ready, and cook the caramel until a tiny spoonful dropped into the water becomes firm, chewy, and able to be plied into a ball.)
Immediately remove caramel from heat, add the cinnamon-salt mixture, and give the caramel several stirs to distribute it evenly. Pour caramel into the prepared pan. Let it sit until cool and firm — about 2 hours, though it goes faster in the fridge. Once caramel is firm, use your parchment paper sling to transfer the block to a cutting board. Use a well-oiled knife, oiling it after each cut (trust me!), to cut the caramel into 1-by-1-inch squares. Wrap each one in a 4-inch square of waxed paper, twisting the sides to close. Caramels will be somewhat on the soft side at room temperature, and chewy/firm from the fridge.
Do ahead: Caramels keep, in an airtight container at room temperature, for two weeks, but really, good luck with that.
Cooking note: Apple cider (sometimes called sweet or “soft” cider), as I’m referring to it here, is different from both apple juice and the hard, or alcoholic, fermented apple cider. It’s a fresh, unfiltered (it has sediment), raw apple juice — the juice literally pressed from fresh apples. It’s unpasteurized, and must be refrigerated, because it’s perishable. In the Northeast, I usually find it at farm stands and some grocery stores. I occasionally find vacuum-sealed bottles called apple cider in the juice aisle, but none of the bottled varieties that I’ve tried has the same delicate apple flavor as the more perishable stuff sold in the refrigerator section.
Excerpted from THE SMITTEN KITCHEN COOKBOOK by Deb Perelman. Copyright © 2012 by Deb Perelman. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.