A new old favorite: Salted Caramel!
Sometimes our job in R&D is to take a great pop and make it better. In the case of 2023’s beloved Salted Caramel pop, we needed to figure out a way to make it hold up more reliably in our carts and in customers’ freezers - meaning, less melty! All that delicious butter and sugar makes for a very melty pop…but how to do it?
Well, when it comes to frozen treats, there is one very important thing to consider: FREEZING POINT DEPRESSION. Water freezes at 0℃, but ingredients like salt, fat or sugar change that value dramatically! Meaning, a pop will never be as solid as ice at 0℃ and the more solutes we add (sugar, salt and the like) the softer it will be.
Believe it or not, an essential part of my toolbox in this role is the r/foodscience subreddit! When facing a problem that has me stumped, this is my first stop. Thanks to the generous food scientists of Reddit, I learned that when sugar caramelizes, it changes composition. It starts as sucrose, but becomes fructose and glucose once the water evaporates during the process. And guess what? Fructose and glucose make the freezing point even LOWER than regular sugar! Thinking “What am I up against?!”, I got to work.
We develop new pops (or reinvent old ones) based first on TASTE. My end goal was to solve for meltiness without sacrificing the deep, rich, burnt-sugar flavor you’d expect from something called Salted Caramel!
We backed off the caramel hoping to improve the texture, but it left much to be desired flavor-wise. We added more salt, but that, too, affected the melt point. What to do, what to do…Adding more caramel (made with sugar, butter, and cream) would get us back to square one. Adding more dairy or water made the flavor too light. But what if…we added just deeply caramelized sugar, without making it into caramel? A ha!
That was the answer. Zaylen and I spent many, MANY hours stooped over our big steel pots, stirring away, caramelizing around 300 pounds of sugar until it was a deep amber before adding water to create a caramel syrup. The water helped to bring the freezing point depression of our blend back into “holds up in a cart” territory, and we didn’t lose out on flavor.
And there you have it, folks! The new and improved Salted Caramel, behind the scenes!
If you’d like to try your hand at making your own caramel sauce at home, this one is my favorite. You’ll put it on everything!
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