We love it when you send us recipes!
We interviewed Vivian Lucero from Otis, Oregon in April (click here). She’s a gourmet cook and a master home cheese maker. We’re delighted that she shared her recipe with us and we can’t wait to try it. Enjoy!
From Vivian…
Living at the coast we are a tourist destination, so we tend to get our shopping and errands done in town before the droves of tourist come for holiday weekends and then we stay home until they leave. This Labor Day weekend I decided to make Jim’s Farmstead Cheese.
When you make a lot of cheese, you have a lot of whey. I give it away if I can. I cook with some if I can, and I freeze it but I just don’t have enough freezer space to save all the whey. Unfortunately, we don’t have any animals we can feed it to.
I pay $8/gallon for good farm milk and it just kills me to have to throw out the whey. So Whey-st not!! I discovered I could make caramel sauce or caramel with whey!!! OMG. Do you know how much it costs to buy caramel sauce?
It was a fun and fruitful experiment over the weekend. I made an amazing caramel sauce with my whey. Caramel is traditionally made with heavy cream, sugar and butter. I could not believe how good this sauce came out using whey and not cream. It has to be so much healthier right?
AND, I also made it in my crock pot! Initially when I began to make it in a pot, I found that it required tending constantly to keep it from boiling over and/or sticking to the bottom of the pan and burning. So, I reduced the whey to half the volume and then I put it in my crock pot to complete the cooking. The results were amazing!!! Of course, I can’t take credit for this discovery because I did find several articles on the web for making caramel with whey. But I adapted it to work for me. I made caramel sauce, but if you continue to reduce the mixture, you can make caramel candy.
I did search your website and found something you don’t have on there; Whey Caramel!!! I hope you will share this with your readers because it’s the one of the best WHEYS, I have found to use my whey!!!
I documented the process with photos and have included the recipe. The recipe calls for 2 quarts of whey but I had 1-1/2 gallons so I multiplied it and probably got a quart plus of caramel sauce. Give it try! You won’t be sorry. There are so many delicious things you can do with caramel sauce besides eating it with a spoon!
Whey-st not, want not!
Vivian
Vivian’s Whey Caramel (So simple!)
2 quarts whey (any whey – sweet or acid)
2 cups sugar
4 oz. butter
1 TB vanilla extract
pinch of salt
Place whey in a deep pot (to keep from boiling over) and simmer, stirring often until reduced by half.
Strain whey in a colander lined with cheese cloth (I decided to do this on my own when I saw bits of curd still in the whey) and return to a clean pot or crock pot.
Add sugar.
If cooking on stove, simmer slowly while stirring to keep from boiling over. I decided to cook in my crock pot so I didn’t have to tend to it. It took about 8 hours in the crock pot.
To make sauce, reduce to a thick syrup consistency then add butter, vanilla and salt.
Continue to cook until you reach the consistency you want.
Skim off any foam from caramel.
Sauce can be cooked down further to make caramel candy. I did not try this as I just wanted to make the sauce.
