dulce de leche

There are some things that make Argentina to an awesome country, with no doubt is 'dulce de leche' one of them. Some of you may have heard of it before, but most of you probably not.

'Dulce de Leche' is the 'Nutella' of Latin America. Everybody knows it, and you can find it in 99% of the Argentine households.

But what exactly is 'dulce de leche'?

The word 'dulce' is Spanish for 'sweet' and 'leche' means milk, which already brings us to the main ingredients. Milk and sugar. The finished product looks like caramel and also tastes similar.

You can buy 'dulce de leche' everywhere here, but because I will really miss it back in Germany, I decided to learn how to make it, therefor me and my family cooked it ourselves yesterday.

You basically just need five things for making the milk caramel: milk, sugar, bicarbonate, cornstarch and patience (some people add vanilla extract but it's totally optional and I decided to leave it out).

We poured the milk into a pot and added the sugar, the cooker has to be on low flame and then you basically just need to stir and wait alternately. The process of making the caramel takes a lot of hours and I don't exaggerate with saying that.
After about two hours we added the bicarbonate, my host mum explained that this step is for the color, and indeed after about an hour later the liquid changed from white into the typical color of 'dulce de leche'. When the caramel was almost finished we also added cornstarch to thicken it.

The Argentine eat 'dulce de leche' with literally everything. I usually eat it with crackers but it's also really common to eat it with bred, cake or walnuts. It's possible to buy sweets here which already contain the treat. One of those sweets is called 'alfajor'. There are many varieties of 'alfajores' and you should definitely try them out if you have the chance or at least google pictures of them.

This is how an 'alfajor' can look like

After 6 hours of cooking, and not always keeping the flame on low because we didn't want to wait, we were finally finished with our first and self made 'dulce de leche' and I was really happy, that we could finally go to sleep because it was already later than 12 am.
 I don't really taste much of a difference between our 'dulce de leche' and the one you can buy in the supermarkets, I only think that ours is a bit sweeter and the consistent is maybe a bit different.
I think I will try out some other recipes sooner or later, maybe one that doesn't need that much patience.
But for now I have a whole bowl of 'dulce de leche'.
Cara
♥♥♥