The bane of my existence this fine Sunday afternoon.
I’ve been trying today to make Bacon, Butterscotch, Apple, Thyme. The Bacon, Apple, and Thyme have all been brilliant and easy.
The Butterscotch has been a bit like my relationship with my ex girlfriend from Jersey; difficult in the face of tenacity.
So far today I’ve tried to make butterscotch 5 times. The only reason I’m writing this now and not standing in the kitchen working on round 6 is because I’ve run out of cream and I think Sarah would hurt me if I left to go to the grocery a 3rd time today.
I’ve gotten close. The first two times I was gunning for a prescribed temperature for my sugar of 350F, both of which resulted in a LOT of smoke in my kitchen. The second two times resulted in something that was edible but not dissimilar enough from my caramel last time to be satisfying. “Butterscotch” is a different word than “Caramel”, so I want them to taste different, dammit. 5th time was kind of a joke, a confirmation that I could repeat the bug. For my sanity, I need to be able to at least repeat something incorrectly to confirm I’m doing it wrong.
It’s not a wash though; why else would I ever have had an excuse to figure out exactly how butterscotch differs from caramel (the interwebz tell me the secret lies in brown v. white sugar)? In the end I HAVE managed to come up with something edible, delicious, in fact. But it wasn’t very pretty, and I knew in my gut it wasn’t right. And ‘eh, close enough’ isn’t what this experiment is about. I want it to be ‘right’, and it’s not yet.
So I’ll keep trying.