Perfect Your Homemade Caramel Recipe With This Unexpected Savory Addition

Whether you've mastered the art of flawlessly caramelizing sugar for homemade caramel sauce, or you're a novice on the journey of learning how to make your own "fancy" desserts, there's one thing we guarantee is missing from your recipe — miso paste. Beautifully salty and savory, and underscored by a deep umami richness, all varieties of miso paste are made from fermented soy beans, with softened grains like barley, rye, and rice often added to the mix. It's the main ingredient in miso soup, and is used as a seasoning in many Japanese dishes.

At first, using this umami paste to prepare a roasted miso maple salmon recipe may seem more appropriate than scooping it into caramel sauce. However, when you consider how popular salted caramel has become, this pairing begins to make a little more sense. The miso essentially acts like a supercharged salt, bringing a beautifully subtle savoriness to soften the caramel's intense sweetness (the sauce is basically pure sugar and cream, after all), and elevating everything from ice cream sundaes to homemade caramel frappuccinos.

The coolest part of this upgrade is that it sounds sophisticated and complex, but it's actually really easy to make. All you have to do is measure out about 2 tablespoons of miso for every cup of sugar you use in your caramel base. Adding it last (after the heavy cream or coconut milk) helps prevent the miso from burning and becoming bitter. However, the caramel should still be warm enough at this stage for the flavors to marry fully.

As mentioned, there are many different varieties of miso — over 1,000, in fact. Of course, even the most well-stocked Asian grocery store will likely only have a few kinds, including popular choices like white, red, and awase miso. Generally speaking, white miso is the best choice for pairing with caramel and other desserts, as it's the mildest and sweetest variety. Though it doesn't taste "sweet" per se, red and awase misos have a distinct sharpness that's missing from white miso, so it's easily the sweetest of the three.

Red miso is the most intense of these choices, with awase landing somewhere in the middle. If you're experimenting at home and love strong flavors, there's nothing wrong with trying either of these out, but they're unlikely to suit most palates. However, that doesn't mean you can't pump up the flavor even more with other ingredients, including rich vanilla bean paste, almond extract, or flavorings from juicy, dark fruits such as cherries and cranberries. Astringent flavors like mint and lemon are more likely to clash with the miso.

You can also make this hack even simpler by turning sweetened condensed milk into rich caramel sauce in just one step using boiling water. This creates a gorgeous, creamy sauce just waiting to be elevated. Since standard cans contain about 1 ¼ cups of sweetened condensed milk, you'll need a little over 2 tablespoons of miso (or add to taste). Simply open the slightly warm can, stir together, and enjoy.