40 Fun Facts About Caramel

Which Netflix series built a deadly challenge around dalgona, a Korean candy of melted sugar and baking soda?

Squid Game turned the retro street snack into a global craze, and vendors saw sales double as fans tried to carve out the stamped shape without snapping it.

Which nougat, caramel and peanut bar did Mars launch in 1930 and name after the family's favorite horse?

Snickers the horse gave the bar its name at the Mars Candy Factory in Chicago, though shoppers in Britain and Ireland knew the same bar as Marathon.

Milk Duds earned the 'duds' in their name in 1928 when the caramels failed to come out as which shape?

Spheres were the goal at Hoffman and Company of Chicago, but the candy would not hold the shape. The 'milk' half of the name came from the milk in the recipe.

Which future chocolate tycoon first got rich on caramels, selling his Lancaster company for $1 million in 1900?

Milton Hershey learned to make caramels with fresh milk in Denver, then sold up after seeing chocolate-making machines at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair.

Which caramel-coated popcorn and peanut snack, long tied to baseball, put a prize in every box from 1912?

Cracker Jack got its name in 1896, and one food historian has called it the first junk food. In 2016 the toy gave way to a QR code.

Samoas, caramel-and-coconut cookies also called Caramel deLites, are sold each year by which youth group?

Girl Scouts sell the same cookie under two names because the name depends on which bakery supplies a troop. About 38 million boxes of Samoas sold in 2013.

Which vegetable needs 30 to 45 minutes of slow cooking to caramelize, the first step of a classic French soup?

Onions are the best-known savory use of caramelization, cooked low and slow until brown and sweet for dishes such as French onion soup.

What do Spain and Mexico call caramel-topped baked custard, a word the British use for an open pastry case?

Flan is turned out of its mold upside down, so the caramel poured in first ends up on top. Its modern form was first written down in a French cookbook of 1897.

Which custard with a brittle caramelized sugar top was once branded with the arms of Trinity College, Cambridge?

Crème brûlée arrived at Trinity in 1879 as Cambridge burnt cream, though a French cookbook had printed a recipe under its French name back in 1691.

Salted caramel reached the mass market in 2008 when Häagen-Dazs and which coffee chain both began selling it?

Starbucks picked up the flavor after high-end chefs had spent the 2000s adding a pinch of salt to their caramel and chocolate desserts.

Which sweet spread did Argentina try to claim as its cultural heritage in 2003, until its neighbors objected?

Dulce de leche is made by simmering milk and sugar for hours until it shrinks to about a sixth of its volume, and it has had its own international day since 1998.

Which apple variety is the classic choice for dipping whole in caramel and serving on a stick?

Granny Smith holds its crunch under the coating. Factories skip the dipping: they wrap each apple in a sheet of caramel, then heat it until the sheet melts on.

Which British monarch made Doncaster butterscotch famous after being presented with a tin of it on a visit to the town?

Queen Victoria's tin came from S. Parkinson & Sons, whose sweets were then sold as Royal Doncaster Butterscotch and advertised as soothing for the chest in winter.

Turtles candies, named after a dipper said one looked like the animal, cover caramel and which nuts in chocolate?

Pecans and caramel dipped in chocolate became Turtles in 1918 at Johnson's Candy Company, where each piece was made by hand on a marble board.

In which American city did Brennan's restaurant create Bananas Foster and its flaming caramelized rum sauce?

New Orleans was a major port for imported bananas in 1951, when the dish was created and named for Richard Foster, who chaired the city's crime commission.

Which gas, released when baking soda hits hot melted sugar, puffs honeycomb toffee into its light, crunchy sponge?

Carbon dioxide bubbles get trapped in the sticky mixture, which sets hard around them. It is the trick inside Crunchie and Violet Crumble bars.

The caramel candy Werther's Original is named after a small town in which country, where its maker began in 1903?

Germany's town of Werther, in Westphalia, gave the candy its name. It sold at home as Werthers Echte from 1969 and took its English name in the 1990s.

Which Australian animal gives its shape to Cadbury's Caramello chocolate, a caramel-filled treat sold since 1966?

Koala-shaped Caramello was reputedly the first mass-market sweet modeled on Australian wildlife, and the cartoon mascot goes by George in some adverts.

Which Dutch city, better known abroad for its cheese, is the birthplace of the caramel-filled stroopwafel?

Gouda bakers are said to have invented the stroopwafel around 1800 by sweetening leftover crumbs, and by 1960 the city alone had 17 factories making them.

Which upside-down French dessert of caramelized apples is named after two sisters who served it at their hotel?

Tarte Tatin was never called that by the Tatin sisters. The name was bestowed after their deaths by the food writer Curnonsky and the Paris restaurant Maxim's.

Which caramel-and-biscuit chocolate bar was sold as Raider in much of mainland Europe until a 1991 change of name?

Twix first rolled out of the Mars factory in Slough, England, in 1967, and a 2012 ad campaign invented a mock feud between the left bar and the right bar.

Which caramel-filled chocolates, shaped like small flat-topped cones, did Mackintosh's of Norwich launch in 1937?

Rolo won the Grand Prix at the Cannes advertising festival in 1996 with a commercial about an elephant taking long-delayed revenge on a boy who had tricked it.

Cajeta, the thick caramel of Celaya in Mexico, is traditionally cooked from which animal's milk?

Goat milk sets cajeta apart from the cow's-milk caramel spreads of South America, and the Philippines makes its own version with water buffalo milk.

In which French region did pastry chef Henri Le Roux create his prize-winning salted butter caramel in 1977?

Brittany's lightly salted demi-sel butter went into the recipe, which was named the best confectionery in France at a Paris trade show in 1980.

Which spirit's rules allow just one additive besides water, plain caramel coloring?

Scotch whisky rules demand at least three years in oak casks, yet they still let distillers adjust the shade of the finished spirit with E150a coloring.

Which 19th-century industry was the first on record to manufacture and use caramel coloring on a wide scale?

Brewing came first, and the coloring now turns up in cola, gravy, pickles, vinegar, brown bread and even cough drops.

The 2007 Lebanese film Caramel is named for a heated paste of sugar and lemon juice that salons use for what?

Hair removal with warm sugar paste is everyday business at the Beirut beauty salon where director Nadine Labaki set her story of five women.

Which towering French celebration dessert is a cone of cream puffs held together with threads of caramel?

Croquembouche means something that crunches in the mouth, and in France and Italy it is a fixture at weddings, baptisms and First Communions.

Which English dessert tops a caramel of boiled condensed milk with sliced fruit and whipped cream?

Banoffee pie blends the words banana and toffee, and its inventors at the Hungry Monk restaurant once offered £10,000 to anyone who could disprove their claim.

The caramel macchiato takes its name from an Italian word for the way espresso is poured into milk, meaning what?

Stained is the literal meaning: a latte macchiato is 'stained milk', steamed milk with a shot of espresso poured in to leave its mark.

When table sugar caramelizes, it first splits into glucose and which other simple sugar, also plentiful in honey?

Fructose and glucose are the two halves of sucrose. Once heat splits them apart, they go on to form hundreds of new compounds that give caramel its flavor.

Which French chemist gave his name to the amino-acid browning reaction often confused with caramelization?

Louis Maillard described it in 1912 while trying to reproduce how living things build proteins. Caramelization needs no amino acids, only sugar and heat.

To which stage of candy making, about 120 °C or 250 °F, are milk caramels cooked to keep them chewy?

Firm ball is too cool to caramelize sugar itself, so the flavor of chewy milk caramels comes from the milk browning instead.

Which caramelized French pastry, 'butter cake' in its local language, did the New York Times call Europe's fattiest?

Kouign-amann is baked slowly until its sugar caramelizes, from a strict original recipe of 40 percent bread dough, 30 percent butter and 30 percent sugar.

Dalgona coffee, renamed after a Korean caramel candy in 2020, is credited to a café owner in which Asian city?

Macau café owner Leong Kam Hon, a former shipwright, first whipped it up for tourists in 1997, and it was long known as Chow Yun-fat coffee after a famous fan.

Which chewy French candy bar prints jokes inside its wrappers, giving France its phrase for a groan-worthy pun?

Carambar was born in 1954 when a factory had surplus cocoa to use up, and legend says a faulty machine stretched the candy into its long, thin shape.

Which Paris pastry chef, dubbed the Picasso of Pastry by Vogue, launched salted butter caramel macarons in the 1990s?

Pierre Hermé was named World's Best Pastry Chef in 2016, and within a few years of his macarons other top chefs were salting their caramel desserts too.

Which compound, released as sugar caramelizes, is known for the intense butter-like taste it gives to caramel?

Diacetyl is one of the molecules that give real butter its taste, which is why plain sugar can turn buttery in the pan with no dairy added.

In which country is milk caramel known as kajmak and spread on the mazurek cakes traditionally eaten at Easter?

Poland borrowed the word from Turkish kaymak, a kind of clotted cream, even though the Polish version is a sweet brown spread of cooked milk and sugar.

Which city is home to Goetze's, maker of Caramel Creams and Cow Tales, which began in 1895 selling chewing gum?

Baltimore's Goetze family developed a soft caramel called Chu-ees in 1917, which evolved into the cream-centered Caramel Creams, also known as Bull's Eyes.