I remember my first introduction to weird forms of sea salt. It was a few years ago while watching Napa Style with Michael Chiarello; he sells grey salt via his show and website. It’s actually great stuff. From there, I’ve learned that there are several forms of more natural sea salts that include color from other things, like pink Hawaiian salt or more moisture like grey salt.

Fleur de sel (flower of the sea, I think) is a French salt that’s supposed to be the best of the best, and it’s tough to argue with that once you try it. It’s better as a condiment than to use just to salt a dish that’s being cooked. And it goes great with sweet stuff.

I love caramel, so I thought I’d try making some caramel with fleur de sel. I’ve found it all over the place on blogs and recipe sites, but I used a standard caramel recipe that I think I found in Gourmet. I just changed and added stuff to try something new. The original recipe called for kosher salt, just a touch, unsalted butter and white sugar. I used fleur de sel, French butter and turbinado sugar, along with some vanilla.

The ingredients I used were:

• 1 cup heavy cream
• 1 teaspoon fleur de sel
• 5 tablespoons unsalted French style butter, in pieces
• 1 1/2 cups turbinado or cane sugar
• 1/4 cup water
• 1/4 cup light corn syrup
• 1 teaspoon good vanilla

That’s all that goes into this, though you’ll need more fleur de sel when the caramels are done.

First thing is to melt the butter and dissolve the salt into the cream but putting all 3 together in a saucepan until the butter is melted and the salt is dissolved (makes sense, huh?). Then combine the sugar, water and corn syrup in a larger saucepan and let the sugar dissolve over medium high heat, stirring only now and then. After the sugar is dissolved, continue cooking for a while to cook the sugar. Be careful, though; it’s harder to tell with Turbinado sugar than white sugar how much to cook. I used my nose to tell me that the sugar was about right, just before burning the sugar.

Take the sugar off the heat and stir in the cream mixture, being careful since it may bubble up. Put the pan back on medium high heat, with a candy thermometer. Stirring frequently, be careful of boiling over, as liquid caramel like this will only cause problems and potentially dangerous burns! Heat the caramel to 250 degrees F and remove it from the heat. If stiffer caramel is desired, the temp can go to 252 or so, or 247 or 248 for softer caramel.

I actually made a double batch… I’m not sure why, but I did. it still worked well in the 8″ square pan I used.

Once the caramel is done, line an 8″ square baking dish with parchment paper and pour the caramel into the pan. Mine took about 2 1/2 hours to set up; it can sit overnight before doing anything, though. I took a 14″ pizza cutter, buttered both sides of the blade, and cut the caramel into 1″ pieces, giving me 64 caramels. I’ve heard a round pizza cutter works well, too. I then cut wax paper into about 4″ squares to wrap the caramels.

I topped each individual caramel with a bit of fleur de sel salt, but it just sat there, not sticking, so I took a spray bottle and misted the top of the caramel with water, allowing the salt to stick better. This worked great! Then I wrapped each caramel in wax paper, twisted the ends, and took a bunch into the office. Lucky coworkers!

I want to try a couple of other things with this simple recipe. I want to try some really good cinnamon; I’m not sure if I want to add it before cooking the caramel or after, with the vanilla. The other thing I want to try is to add a bit of ancho pepper to give it just a bit of heat. I think the ancho would go well with the caramel as it’s a bit of a sweeter pepper.

The cooking took about 20 minutes; the wrapping of the caramels another 20. So the whole thing is pretty quick to do.