{"id":172,"date":"2013-12-06T10:14:58","date_gmt":"2013-12-06T14:14:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nancyoster.com\/?p=172"},"modified":"2013-12-06T10:51:09","modified_gmt":"2013-12-06T14:51:09","slug":"wisconsin-farm-girl-lorettas-caramels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nancyoster.com\/?p=172","title":{"rendered":"Wisconsin Farm Girl: Loretta’s Caramels"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>My friend Loretta is 85-1\/2. She grew up on a dairy farm in Wisconsin during the Great Depression, one of 13 children.<\/p>\n

We’ve been friends for about 38 years. Recently, I’ve been helping her organize her recipe file, gathering food stories to add to her recipe cards.<\/p>\n

Yesterday we made caramels together from her mother’s recipe. She’d talked with her sister the night before and gotten some tips\u2014like chill the caramels 5 minutes in the freezer before scoring. Loretta asked her sister, “How did Mother do it? She didn’t have a freezer!” Her sister pointed out that the porch was her mom’s freezer. She made caramels in the winter when there was snow outside. A few minutes in the snow firmed those caramels right up.<\/p>\n

I brought my fancy new spatula\/candy thermometer<\/a> and the ingredients. Loretta measured and I stirred. When the mixture reached 250 degrees we poured our satiny caramel onto a buttered sheet pan and after a short time in the freezer we pressed\u00a0 pecan halves into the cooling caramel.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The next trick was to cut between pecans… after waiting for the caramel to cool enough to cut it with a knife.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Being impatient to get to the eating part we started cutting too soon and had strings of hot caramel hanging from our knife, so I grabbed a pair of scissors, which cut cleanly between each pecan. Loretta wrapped while I cut.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Yeah, some of them didn’t make it to the waxed paper wrapping part. We also made turtles. I’ll save that for the next post.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, here’s the caramel recipe:<\/p>\n

Cold Weather Caramels<\/strong>
\n3\/4 cup sweetened condensed milk
\n2 cups brown sugar
\n1 cup dark corn syrup (or you could try Golden Syrup)
\n1 cup butter
\n1\/2 tsp. salt
\n1 tsp. vanilla
\nPecans<\/p>\n

1) Combine all but vanilla and pecans. Bring to a boil and cook, stirring, until the mixture reaches 240 degrees (soft ball).<\/p>\n

2) Add vanilla and cook, stirring, until mixture reaches 250 degrees (firm or hard ball).<\/p>\n

3) Pour into pan (about 1″ thickness) and put into freezer for 5 minutes.<\/p>\n

4) Remove from freezer and press in a pecan half for each caramel. Mark squares with a knife and let cool completely. Then cut with a knife (or scissors) and wrap in waxed paper.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My friend Loretta is 85-1\/2. She grew up on a dairy farm in Wisconsin during the Great Depression, one of 13 children. We’ve been friends for about 38 years. Recently, I’ve been helping her organize…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nancyoster.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nancyoster.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nancyoster.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nancyoster.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nancyoster.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=172"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.nancyoster.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":187,"href":"https:\/\/www.nancyoster.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172\/revisions\/187"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nancyoster.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nancyoster.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nancyoster.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}