The World's Best Butterscotch Recipe
By Elaine Corn
First, let's clear up one thing. Butterscotch is not caramel. Caramel is cooked sugar. It starts clear and bubbly, and if you keep cooking it, it turns color, becoming amber and ending about the color of iced tea. (And it can quickly burn!) If you add cream to that nicely browned liquid sugar, you get caramel sauce, which looks like butterscotch.
For butterscotch fundamentals, Teresa Urkofsky, pastry instructor at American River College in Sacramento, Calif., tells it straight.
"The essential ingredients are brown sugar and butter," she says. "It can be light brown sugar or dark brown sugar."
Urkofsky makes butterscotch pudding on top of the stove. She browns the sugar and butter, letting it lightly caramelize, then adds milk and cornstarch. "I like the low reaction temperature with cornstarch. You don't have to cook out a flour taste," she says.
She tempers in eggs, pours it into serving bowls and stashes them in the refrigerator.
There is no question that she loves it. "It's such a round, beautiful flavor that might remind you of home."
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There's no Scotch in butterscotch, unless you're talking about the butterscotch pudding at Sacramento's Grange restaurant.
It's made by pastry chef Jackie Phongsavath. She works in a basement dessert corner, and yes, she puts Scotch in butterscotch. She has to go upstairs to the restaurant's bar to ask for it. The bartender usually gives her well Scotch, something like Dewar's.
This is a new, daring recipe because it defies the essence of butterscotch. There's no butter, brown sugar or thickener. Without these traditional elements, how does Chef Jackie get to butterscotch? With technical twists you can probably accomplish at home.
First, she separates 30 eggs for the yolks. "I'm probably not world champion, but I usually get that task done in about three minutes," she says.
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She was allowed to reveal the new recipe's two prevailing secrets. One is a shortcut: Guittard-brand butterscotch chips. Taste test after blind taste test proclaimed the chips gave the best taste and best consistency compared with the previous traditional stovetop version. With eyes open, the pudding had sheen.
But the second secret is more challenging. It's exacting sugar work that brings sugar and water to about 230 F -- still clear but beginning to caramelize.
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"This is the fun part," Chef Jackie says. "We just wait. You just basically want to bring your sugar to a stage of caramelization before it hits any brown color."
With sizzling fanfare, cream hits the bubbling sugar, along with salt, vanilla and the Scotch. She adds the chips to the pot last, so they lie on the surface instead of sinking to the bottom, where they could possibly scorch. She whisks without end to prevent hot spots and keep it all smooth.
"You know it's ready when everything is melted," she says, "and you lift the whisk to make sure there's no sugar, no butterscotch chips stuck to the whisk."
Finally, the yolks are tempered into the base. A small amount of the hot butterscotch base is whisked into all the yolks, then the now-lukewarm yolk mixture is added back to the hot base and whisked with determination.
It's important to strain the base. Sure enough, a strainer caught some cooked whites and unsmoothed yolk.
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To bake, Chef Jackie fills 30 ramekins per daily batch. For a gentler ride through the heat, they bake in a pan with water added, called a water bath. She covers the pan with foil, making sure to crimp it well around the sides. She pokes a few steam vents into the foil. The pudding, essentially, bakes and steams.
Grange Butterscotch Pudding
Serves 6
Equipment
Ramekins, whisk, double-mesh strainer, 9-by-13-inch baking pan, foil
Ingredients
4 egg yolks from large eggs
½ cup Guittard butterscotch chips
2¼ cups cream
¼ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon vanilla
1½ teaspoons Scotch
¼ cup water
½ cup sugar
Directions
1. Set six sturdy 4-ounce ramekins in a baking pan, such as a metal 9-by-13-inch rectangular cake pan. Preheat the oven to 300 F. Set a medium-sized double-mesh strainer over a medium bowl and have it ready on your countertop.
2. Separate the egg yolks. Reserve them in a bowl. Measure the butterscotch chips and have them ready in a bowl.
3. In a large measuring cup or pitcher, stir together cream, salt, vanilla and Scotch. Have it convenient to the stove.
4. Combine water and sugar in a medium pot. Heat over medium-high heat until the sugar dissolves and boils gently, about 8 to 10 minutes (up to 220 F to 230 F on a candy thermometer), making sure the sugar does not darken.
5. With a whisk at the ready, pour the cream mixture into the hot sugar. (It will sizzle.) Whisk well to combine, going around the sides and across the bottom of the pot. Add the chips, continuing to whisk to prevent the chips from scorching. Turn off the heat. Continue whisking until no sugar or chips cling to the whisk and the mixture is smooth.
6. Whisk some of the hot butterscotch mixture into the egg yolks, whisking gently but thoroughly. Then pour the tempered yolks back into the main mixture in the pot, whisking well.
7. Strain the butterscotch through a double-mesh strainer into a bowl.
8. Ladle butterscotch evenly into the arranged ramekins.
9. Fill the baking pan with hot water so it comes halfway up the sides of the ramekins. Cover the pan well with foil and crimp it to seal well around the pan's rim. Poke several holes in the foil to act as steam vents.
10. Set in the oven and bake 45 to 50 minutes or until just set in the center.
Zester Daily contributor Elaine Corn is a James Beard Award-winning cookbook author and food editor. A former editor at the Louisville Courier-Journal and the Sacramento Bee, Corn has written six cookbooks and contributed food stories to National Public Radio.
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