Caramelisation is an age-old process with a long history of delivering a sweet treat. But caramel is also used as a flavour and a colour, currently ranked the world’s most used food colour by weight. Food color manufacturer Oterra discusses caramel's applications.
Caramel isn’t quite as old as time, but ever since mankind started cooking over fire, people have potentially created caramel.
Around the year 250, sweet caramels are thought to have been produced in India as the boiled result of sugar cane juice.
In fact, the word caramel is based on the Latin canna melis, which refers to the sugar cane it is made from.
From India it travelled to Persia (modern day Iran), Greece, Rome and then throughout Europe.
It is believed the first hard caramel was produced by the Egyptians around 1000 AD when they were experimenting to create an energy-rich food that was easy to handle and transport. The result was something like what we would consider a hard-boiled lolly.
Meanwhile, Indonesia is thought to be the first country to have produced a caramelised sweetened milk in the 1500s.
Spanish explorers then transported it to the Americas around the same time as colonisers introduced cane sugar and milk-producing livestock to Latin America. The result was what is commonly known as dulce de leche. Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, and Peru all proudly claim to have invented this delicacy.
There are also records from the 1650s of American settlers producing a boiled caramel candy with milk and fat to create a chewier caramel candy.
Fast forward to today, and caramel is still loved around the world and very much part of our food culture. We use it as food, flavour and as colour. It has been used by beer breweries since the 1800s and is found in foods ranging from soda to sauces and cakes.
In fact, it is the world’s most-used food colour by weight.
According to Innova Market New Products Database, in Australia and New Zealand over the last 12 months, caramel flavour (including salted caramel) is the top-ranking flavour in new product launches in Chocolate Confectionery. For Desserts & Ice-Creams it is ranked second, and fourth in the Dairy and Non-Dairy Yogurt category.
The versatility of caramel means manufacturers can combine caramel with other flavours to create truly decadent eating experiences across multiple product categories.
One of the reasons for its popularity is it can appeal across taste preferences. For sweeter options there are products such as Cadbury Caramilk, salted caramel or toffee flavours and white chocolate. For more mature palates there are dark chocolate combinations with salted caramel, desserts with a burnt caramel component, and caramel/nut liqueurs.
The caramel transformation
In its simplest form, caramel is burnt sugar. Think of heating butter and sugar in a pan to produce a caramel for traditional European caramelised potatoes or homemade muesli.
Simple sugars such as glucose, fructose or sucrose are used to make caramel colours. These sugars are carbohydrates; that is, their molecules contain carbon, hydrogen and oxygen atoms linked by covalent bonds. (Covalent bonds share electrons which keeps them attracted to each other.)
When these molecules are heated during caramelisation, the atoms are redistributed and combined, producing larger carbohydrates (polymers), water vapour, and volatile compounds, which are responsible for the pleasant caramel aroma.
Making caramel is a complex process that produces and interacts with hundreds of molecules, with temperature and the type of carbohydrate largely determining which polymer is created.
A final caramel colour product of any type does not correspond to a perfectly defined mixture of essential substances. It develops in all its complexity due to multiple random interactions during cooking. That’s why the production of caramel, in many ways, is an art as much as a science.
Oterra has been specialising in caramel since 1968. During those 50-plus years, great strides have been taken in understanding the various molecules produced by burning sugar, and Oterra’s scientists have been able to use this knowledge to improve its caramel products.
In fact, Oterra is one of the world’s largest suppliers of the brown colour from caramelised sugar with one of the most extensive product lines of the brown colour from caramel.
These shades of colour vary from yellow to reddish brown to a deep blackish brown. The colour also has a colloidal charge depending on the manufacturing process and its intended application. For example, beer requires a positively charged colour while soft drinks require a negatively charged colour to avoid precipitation and mist problems.
When you are developing novel and existing new flavour combinations, specialist technical knowhow in caramel should be sought to get the best possible results.
This article first appeared in the September edition of Food & Drink Business magazine.
