Adventures In Sweet Milk

Dulce de leche.  Sweet milk.  Divinely delicious creamy caramel.  Yes, you can buy it in a can if your grocery store can keep it in stock.  But if not, never fear.  It’s about the easiest thing in the world to make yourself.

Start with a can of sweetened condensed milk.  Peel off the label, set it into a large pot, and cover it with water by at least an inch.  More water is better.  Bring the water to a boil, then reduce the heat and simmer for anywhere from 2-4 hours.  The longer you cook it, the deeper the flavor will be.  It’s best if you use a regular can for this, not a pull-top can.

Here’s the catch.  (Oh, come on, you knew there had to be a catch…)  You cannot walk away from this process. As the water simmers, it evaporates, and your water level drops in the pot.  Your can of milk must remained completely covered AT ALL TIMES!  If you let the water level drop too far, you are in danger of your can exploding which is problematic because 1) explosions are bad, 2) you will have a huge mess, and 3) you won’t have dulce de leche.

In the can I cooked for this blog post, I covered the can by 2 inches of water and cooked it for three hours, checking on it every 30 minutes.  If it needed more water (which it always did), I boiled some in my kettle and added it.  You could add tap water, but you don’t want to drop your water temperature too much, so it’s best if you add really hot water.

Once you’re done with the cooking, leave the can in the water to cool completely.  Once it’s cool, you have a can of dulce de leche which can be kept at room temperature for several months.  Once it’s opened, of course, it needs to be refrigerated in a sealed container and used up in a couple weeks.  But there’s no reason not to make multiple cans of it at once, if you find yourself using it often.

What can you do with it?  So many things!  It can be a cake filling.  You can fill little shortbread cookie sandwiches with it.  You can use it like jam, spreading it on toast or bagels or pancakes or waffles.  You can drizzle it over ice cream.  You can swirl it into brownie batter before you bake.  You can stir a spoonful into your morning coffee, which gives you creamer, sweetener, and caramel all in one spoonful.  You can eat it straight out of the can by the spoonful. My mom and I each took a turn with quality control.

And you can use it to make banoffee pie, which is what I did.  Start with a premade graham cracker crust.  Scoop your dulce de leche out of the can and spread it into the crust.  Put this into the fridge while you make your whipped cream.

Make as much whipped cream as you want.  I chose to whip up just a cup of heavy cream with a couple tablespoons of powdered sugar and a dash of vanilla.  As you will see in the pictures, this was not enough whipped cream to completely fill the pie crust, so perhaps I should have made more.  Also, don’t do what I did, which was temporarily forget about the cream as it was being whipped.  By the time I got back to it, the cream was just past the point of smooth but stiff peaks and just shy of butter, which is why it looks weird once it’s spread over the pie.  But it still tasted good.

After the cream is whipped, slice up a couple ripe bananas and layer them over the dulce de leche.  I chose to do just a single layer of bananas, although you could do more if you wanted.  Then cover with the whipped cream and dust some cocoa over the top.  Alternatively, you could melt some chocolate and squeeze it through a pastry bag onto the top.  But you can’t beat cocoa for “quick and easy.”

And that’s it!  This is quite sweet and very rich, so be sure to serve small slices.  Enjoy!

Quick and Easy Banoffee Pie

Click here for printable PDF of recipe

INGREDIENTS

14 oz can of dulce de leche*

1 prepared graham cracker crust

2 ripe bananas

lightly sweetened whipped cream

cocoa

DIRECTIONS

Spread the dulce de leche into the pie crust in a smooth layer. Slice the bananas and place them onto the dulce de leche in a single layer. Top with a generous amount of sweetened whipped cream and dust with cocoa.

NOTES

*if dulce de leche is unavailable, consider making your own with a can of sweetened condensed milk