Make Sweetened Condensed Milk In Under An Hour With One Easy Addition

Cooking with sweetened condensed milk adds delicious, sugary creaminess to your recipes. Whether you're topping off a freshly poured coffee or caramelizing pork for tonight's dinner, the sticky ingredient has many uses besides pumping up the texture and taste of dessert recipes. Should you have your heart set on whipping up a pumpkin pie and find that your kitchen cabinet is disappointingly void of the canned stuff, however, you can save yourself a trip to the store by making your own sweetened condensed milk at home. Instead of reaching for a substitute ingredient, simmer your way to a sugary reduction of milk and get cooking. Typically, the process can take the better part of a day, but with the right recipe, your kitchen will be equipped with usable sweetened condensed milk in under an hour.

Instead of endlessly cooking milk and sugar over low heat, you'll be turning up the flames in your kitchen and adding heavy cream. The cream not only helps stabilize the milk so you can have a faster reduction without any curdling effect, but it also adds flavor enhancement by introducing lactose into the recipe, which will brown and toast due to the Maillard reaction.

Use almost a full cup of heavy cream when combining the helpful addition to several cups of your choice of milk and around a cup of sugar. You'll want to continually stir the ingredients while cooking until the syrupy milk begins to foam, being careful to scrape the sides of the pot so that no part of your recipe is overcooked or left to burn along the edges. After the stirred ingredients have been cooked to creamy, sweet perfection, you should easily observe that the overall volume of ingredients has been reduced by half or more of the original amount.

Once you have sampled your homemade creation, you may be making this delicious recipe on the regular. You can even add extra ingredients like dried lavender and warming spices like cinnamon, ginger, or cloves to future batches as you build the perfect sweet ingredient to use in everything from Vietnamese iced coffee to your morning oatmeal.