Saturday Dinner I: Goat-Milk Caramel with Spirits (Cajeta de Leche Envinada)

This is a fairly simple "dish," but it is delicious. The only problem is that I went out of town right after I made it and Katy ate all of it before I could have more than a couple of tablespoons (out of about a cup and a half of cajeta). We made it for some friends who came over to our house for dinner. This is the first of four posts about that meal.

Anyway, our friends are French, but one of them travels to Mexico regularly, so I was interested in running a good weekend dinner by him. I started cooking the night before, because that's the kind of cool guy I am on Friday night, particularly since the baby was born. Anyway, our friends made crêpes a few weeks later and gave us a couple when we went to the park with them. The cookbook suggests eating the cajeta with crêpes, which we could have done except -- did I mention that Katy ate all of it? In case you're wondering, yes, it was the first time in my life that anyone had stopped a stroller on a jogging path to hand me crêpes -- maybe I just don't get out much. The cajeta would have been really good with the crêpes, but it was also really good as a topping for ice cream, which is how we used it.

On to the cooking! Here's the mise:

It was much easier than I had feared to find goat milk, and goat milk made all of the difference in the flavor (not surprisingly). We don't keep grain alcohol around the house (at least for long...), so I used some Black Seal rum instead. I know, Bermuda is not exactly Mexico, but I'm not the first person to cook with it, at least.

I put everything but the baking soda and rum into our Le Creuset pot:

I brought the pot to a simmer and added the baking soda (I was careful about stirring the mixture to keep it from foaming up, but it wasn't really a problem). I kept simmering, stirring it every once in a while:

How did I manage to take a picture from the right side while stirring the pot with my right hand? I have three arms. Also, no, my Rice ring does not have that much schmutz in it, and we don't actually employ the steamer in this dish; we just made some food for Charlie at the same time. Whew.

Anyway, this is what the pot looked like after a while (I don't know, something like half an hour; I didn't really pay attention):

Mmm...caramel. (And yes, the camera is still misrepresenting the amount of schmutz in my ring.) It reminds me of my friends who were married in the Caramel Valley, which I understand is next to the Land of Chocolate, although, sadly, I never got to see it while we were out there... (Yes, Jon, I'm still beating that joke to death, as is my wont.)

Once the caramel was ready (a bit thinner than corn syrup when hot, and making fairly hard droplets when they are cooled to room temperature), I strained the caramel into a jar, careful to leave certain undesirable things like the cinnamon stick behind:

I added the rum and put the jar into an ice bath to cool:

Could the ice bath have been deeper? Probably, if I had used a more appropriate bowl, but, you know, it was late. We ultimately served it on vanilla ice cream (homemade, of course) at the end of a long meal and a long day in the kitchen, so we were a bit lazy with the prezo (all together now, "like with the ice bath?"):

Later, we found that putting the cajeta under the ice cream looked much better and less drizzly. Overall, the cajeta was great, and it was really easy. Not that I really did so often before, I don't think I'll ever again be able to eat jarred caramel on ice cream. The goat milk flavor (for those who have not partaken, it tastes like goat cheese, duh!) is really interesting and makes it virtually impossible for the caramel to be cloying, which it can sometimes be. And a bit of 140-proof rummy goodness certainly doesn't hurt the overall flavor... I will definitely make this again, but I'll wait until I'm not about to travel for a while so (maybe) I can eat some of it.

Sources:
Goat milk from Meyenberg
Karo corn syrup
Gosling's Black Seal Rum