Wet Method Dairy Free Caramel

This delicious and perfectly colored dairy free caramel sauce is made using the traditional wet method for making caramel. Our wet method dairy free caramel is an intermediate method for caramel and makes great dairy free caramel for your favorite desserts!

We had originally published a giant dairy free caramel post that had 3 different techniques for making caramel in them but the post got so long, I decided to divide it up into their own recipe posts. This one is the wet method for our dairy free caramel!

Check out the other 2 caramel methods here: easy dairy free caramel and our dry method dairy free caramel.

This is an intermediate recipe for making caramel, our other 2 methods are the easy method and the dry method (which is more advanced and easier to mess up). If you’re new to making dairy free caramel, I recommend using the easy method or this wet method.

With traditional caramel making, there are 2 main types: a wet method and a dry method. The dry caramel is where the sugar is melted in the pan without any liquid added, and wet caramel is where the sugar is melted in the pan along with a little bit of water to help it melt more evenly.

• Pros: easier to make than dry caramel, deeper tasting than the easy caramel, doesn’t seem to need corn syrup to prevent recrystallization of sugar.
• Cons: Slightly more complicated than the easy method, easier to burn the caramel.

This seems to work pretty well without corn syrup and just using cream of tartar instead. Cream of tartar adds a little bit of acid to the caramel to help prevent recrystallization of the sugar.

Recrystallization of the sugars in caramel will make it gritty and not smooth, so you don’t want that to happen if you want satiny smooth and shiny caramel sauce.

Since this is a slightly more difficult method of making caramel than our easy dairy free caramel, I recommend reading through the “how to”, tips, and step by step photos on how to make this caramel to make sure you’re on the right track before you begin.

I’m not a confectioner or a pro at making caramel, so if you have any technical questions about caramel I probably can’t answer them for you. But I recommend reading articles like this one from Cooks Illustrated with tips on how to make the best caramel.

How to make dairy free wet caramel

This is about an intermediate level caramel making method. I adapted this recipe from the Bon Appetit recipe for wet caramel.

This wet caramel recipe isn’t as thick as the easy recipe or the dry method recipe, so if you’d like to make caramel apples with this recipe, reduce the amount of Silk half and half.

Here are the steps to make dairy free wet caramel. Don’t forget the recipe card with ingredient amounts for this is at the end of the post!

1. Place sugar, water, and cream of tartar in a small heavy-bottom sauce pan.
2. Heat over medium low heat until the sugar melts and starts to darken in color.
3. Once the color starts to change in your sugar, really keep an eye on it! It will change colors and scorch quickly if you’re not watchful.
4. Once the sugar is a dark straw or amber color, remove it immediately from the heat and whisk in the dairy free butter.
5. Whisk in the Silk half and half and salt.
6. Pour into a glass or heat-proof container and allow to cool. Don’t scrape the sides of the pan into the container with the caramel sauce.
7. Serve while it’s warm or store in the fridge of the freezer for later.

This method is fairly straightforward. The sugar will act like it’s not going to melt at first and even look like it’s going to harden before it actually begins to fully melt.

Once it melts and the color starts to change, this is when you’ll need to be very attentive to your sugar to keep it from burning. Some people like it dark and burnt tasting, but I don’t, so I recommend getting it off the heat and immediately adding the butter when it’s amber colored.

The sugar will still try to cook more even when it’s off the heat since the pan is still really hot, so you’ll want to add your butter right away to help bring the temperature down a bit and stop the sugar from continuing to cook.

When you add the butter it will bubble up quite a bit (just like the dry caramel but not as much), so watch your hands for splatters of hot melted sugar.

I noticed that when I whisked in my Silk dairy free half and half into this recipe, it foamed up. After you pour this into your storage dish, just scoop off the foam as much as you can and stir in the rest into the caramel.

I’m not sure if it foams up with canned coconut milk, but I stirred my caramel foam into a cup of hot coffee. So good!

Wet method caramel tips:

• Use white sugar vs. unbleached natural sugar. Natural sugars will burn faster than white sugar in the wet and dry caramel recipes.
• Resist the urge to scrape down the sides of the pan as you cook and melt the sugar, this can facilitate recrystallization of the sugars once it cools.
• Stir with a spoon initially, then switch to a whisk once the sugar begins to melt.
• When you pour the caramel out into your storage dish, don’t scrape down the sides (you can swipe the bottom of the pan gently, but if there is any stuck caramel, leave it in the pan).

What kind of dairy free butter can I use for this caramel?

I tested this method these methods of making dairy free caramel sauce with the Country Crock Plant Butter sticks made with avocado oil.

So far I haven’t tested this recipe out with any other brands of dairy free butter, so I’m not sure if this will work with other brands until I do more testing (right now we have containers of caramel all over our house so we’ll end up waiting a little while to start testing this with other types of butter.

The Country Crock plant butter sticks (we use the avocado oil ones) do not contain soybean oil but the Country Crock plant butter tub margarine does contain soybean oil in it. The sticks have a warning that says “may contain soy” so use at your discretion if you have soy allergies. We have soy allergies and don’t have problems with the Country Crock plant butter sticks.

Can I freeze caramel sauce?

Yes! All 3 of of our caramel recipes (the easy method, wet method, and the dry caramel method) can be frozen and thawed with great results.

If you make a big batch and won’t use it all, add it to a freezer-proof container and freeze for up to several months.

We tested the freezing and thawing of all of our caramel sauces within a day or 2, so we’re not sure how this caramel sauce will taste after 3-4 months of being in a freezer. But if you have an airtight container, it shouldn’t matter too much.

Before freezing, make sure that your caramel sauce is cooled completely to prevent condensation in the jar or container. And if you are using a glass jar, make sure there is some headspace to allow for expanding caramel as it freezes.

Why not use natural ingredients in this recipe?

One of the reasons I didn’t use more natural ingredients in these recipes (like coconut milk instead of Silk half and half, or coconut oil instead of Country Crock plant butter) is that some of the natural ingredients are not as stable as the other ingredients I chose.

As much as we try to use natural ingredients, sometimes those ingredients aren’t as stable as their real dairy counterparts and don’t perform well in place of them.

For instance, coconut oil melts much faster and separates easier than real dairy butter, so we used the Country Crock plant butter sticks that act more like real butter than coconut oil does in recipes like this.

If you’d like to use more whole-food and natural ingredients in your caramel recipe, I’d recommend looking for caramel recipes that have been developed using these ingredients since some substitutions won’t work well in this recipe.

Honorable mentions: Failed dairy free caramel methods

Since I also tried out a few other methods of making caramel that really didn’t turn out well at all, I wanted to share these with you as well in case you want to try these out, too.

Melt butter and sugar together

In this method, I melted 6 Tablespoons of Country Crock plant butter and 1 cup of white sugar together in the pan. I based this off of my grandma’s English toffee recipe, I figured if I made a toffee base then added Silk half and half it’d make caramel.

With the first method, I noticed that without the half and half or coconut milk, it ended up being a softish toffee texture (soft crack), so I decided to try making the toffee and adding half and half to make a caramel.

Unfortunately this method didn’t work. The sugar wouldn’t fully dissolve and the butter separated from the sugar as it cooked ending in a separated sugar and butter mess.

Coconut condensed milk

I tried making a condensed milk caramel/dulce de leche with coconut condensed milk in the oven using this method from Spend with Pennies.

Unfortunately this didn’t turn out either. It got slightly darker in color but did not thicken or make a caramel type sauce. The coconut sweetened condensed milk is not suitable for that type of recipe I guess and won’t replace real sweet and condensed milk to make dulce de leche. Which is a huge bummer because I was really hoping it would work!

So this condensed coconut milk probably also won’t work with the pressure cooker or the stovetop method either since it definitely didn’t work in the oven.

Check out our other caramel recipes:

• Easy dairy free caramel
• Dry method dairy free caramel
• Dairy free caramel apples