By Chef David “Smitty” Smith ·
And the winner is … I wanted to give you my thoughts on the two different butterscotch recipes from the last article.
From the responses that I received, both recipes got some good comments, but there were only a few responses from people that made both recipes. Both recipes had good flavor but also had their differences. The first difference was apparent and that was that the sauce with the corn syrup was much thicker. It also hardened quickly once it hit the cold ice cream making a shell as opposed to being brittle. Don’t try dipping a cone in this or you will need lots of napkins. It is just too chewy to make a good dip for cones.
The sauce without the corn syrup was much thinner and remained a liquid sauce even after sitting on the ice cream. Even as the sauces cooled in separate containers to store, the sauce with the corn syrup became extremely thick to the point where I could roll it into little candy butterscotch balls and then chill to harden a little more in the refrigerator.
I am curious to see if I can make a butterscotch ball that would be able to pass as a candy that would melt in your mouth. My guess is that as long as it stayed chilled on a plate and not warmed to room temperature, it would work. Maybe simply rolling small butterscotch balls in some Jimmies to take some of the stickiness away could be a simple answer as to how that sauce could double as a candy. I also would like to see about making a chocolate-covered butterscotch ball, but I just didn’t have time to experiment more with those candy aspects.
I’m guessing that consistency was getting pretty close to what you would use for covering apples since this is that time of year and the coating for apples is much stickier and pliable than an ice cream cone dip, but again, I need time for more experimenting.
It wasn’t until the re-heating of the sauce with the corn syrup that I noticed it was grainy, which didn’t seem to be the case when I first made. I tried reheating both sauces twice with the same results. The thinner non-corn syrup sauce was fine, but the sauce with the corn syrup remained grainy. This led me to add a little more butter and cream to the corn syrup sauce allowing for more liquid so that the brown sugar could dissolve more. I added 1 tablespoon of butter and probably 2 oz. of cream and it changed it enough so it was smooth. It also lasted longer over ice cream before congealing. Even when it did start to thicken, it was nowhere near as shell-like as before, but it was still much thicker than the thinner non-corn syrup sauce.
With this new consistency, I would have to say there goes the candy aspect of this sauce, but since that wasn’t the original idea anyway, it did make it more like a sauce and therefore user friendly.
So which one did I prefer? For the first try, I have to say the sauce without the corn syrup. I just think that the consistency was better for me personally. I could take a spoon of ice cream and get enough sauce to flavor without getting so much butterscotch goo that I couldn’t get any ice cream flavor at all. After adding more butter and cream to the sauce, however, I honestly don’t know. I really liked both.
I still have to try them both again, but I really don’t need to be eating that much ice cream, so I’ll take a break and get back to you. Please let me know how you made out with them and which one was your favorite.
Now that I’ve talked about the two sauces, there is one more main thing to take away from this article, and that is to use the recipe as a guide and not as a bible. By simply adding a little more butter and cream to the recipe that my sister gave me, that butterscotch sauce went from being not even close to as good to what I would expect for a butterscotch sauce, to making a choice difficult. Again, when I get more time I want to experiment a little more and see just how far I can take these sauces for different things. Enjoy.
Smitty is a personal chef specializing in dinner parties, cooking classes and special events. Trained under Master Chef Anton Flory at Top Notch Resort in Stowe, Vt., Smitty is known for his creative use of fresh ingredients. He has been a chef for PGA’s Memorial Tournament for more than 15 years and ran the main kitchen at the World Games. For more information and archived copies of Stir it Up, visit chefsmitty.com. Smitty welcomes questions and comments at smitty@chefsmitty.com, tmmsmitty@gmail.com or (530) 412-3598.
