I started with Bruce Moffitt’s recipe, but made some minor changes. They’re listed below:

Crystallized Ginger

a 9 to 10 oz piece of fresh ginger (try to find a piece that’s pretty straight, and without a bunch of small knobs)
2 cups sugar
1 tbsp water

Peel the ginger using your favorite method (the easiest is with a spoon), and cut out any discolored spots, as well as the dried up ends. Cut the ginger up into 1/8″ dice, then combine in a bowl with the sugar. Stir it up really well.

Put the water into a heavy bottomed saucepan (something non-stick would probably work well, if you’ve got it, but the bottom has to be heavy). Add in the sugar and ginger and cook over medium-low heat, stirring occasionally, until the sugar’s melted and it’s formed a syrup.

Reduce the heat to as low as it will go, Cook for about half an hour. If the mixture’s foaming, don’t worry – mine did that too. After that half hour, don’t stray too far from the stove. Keep an eye on it, still stirring occasionally, watching for signs of crystallization. You’ll see it start around the edges of the pot. Mine started to turn after about a total of 50 minutes of cooking time. When you can move the crystals into the middle of the pan and there’s hardly any syrup left at the bottom of the pot, you’re done! Remove it from the heat immediately, pour it onto a silpat or some other surface that you’ll be able to get cooled sugar off of easily and let cool.

When it’s cooled down, put it into an air tight container and store in a cool, dark (and dry) place.

I ended up with about half ginger pieces, ginger-flavored sugar crystal chunks. And oh, is it good! Matt says the sugar tastes just like ginger Altoids, but a tiny bit sweeter.

Oh. My. God. They are incredible. Many, many, many, many thanks to The District Domestic for the recipe.

Homemade Salted Caramels

 
1 cup heavy cream
5 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into pieces
1 teaspoon fleur de sel (I used Morton Sea Salt)
1 1/2 cups sugar
1/4 cup light corn syrup
1/4 cup water

Line an 8×8″ glass baking dish with parchment and grease really well with butter.

Bring cream, butter and salt to a boil in a small saucepan. Remove from heat and set aside.

In a medium saucepan, bring sugar, corn syrup and water to a boil, stirring just until the sugar is dissolved. Then continue boiling without stirring until the mixture is a light golden color and a candy thermometer reaches 250 degrees. Don’t worry how long this takes – some recipes say it takes 10 minutes and others say up to 45 minutes. The important thing is that it reaches 250 degrees and is a light golden caramel color.

I’m not sure what I did wrong, but when my sugar mixture reached 250 degrees, it wasn’t all that dark. I certainly wouldn’t have called it a “light golden caramel” color. However, when I put the cream mixture in, the color came pretty close to what I expected by the time it reached 248 degrees.

When this happens, carefully stir in the butter/cream mixture. The caramel will bubble up, so be careful. Stir constantly and continue to cook until the mixture reaches 248 degrees.

Make sure to stir the cream mixture well before adding it to the pot – the cream “head” will end up sticking to the side of the small pot, and you don’t want to leave any of that behind. And oh boy, did it bubble up. And over the sides of my pot. Next time I’ll use a taller one.

Then pour into the prepared baking dish and let cool at least 2 hours. Sprinkle the top of the caramels with a generous amount of nice sea salt. When the mixture has set, cut into pieces and wrap in parchment paper.

I put the “topping” salt on as soon as I poured the caramel into the pan, and I think that was a mistake. Much of it dissolved, and formed a slight crust on top rather than a nice garnish. It still tasted divine, so that’s not a problem, but like I said, not what I was aiming for. Next time I think I’ll put the salt on after the first hour of cooling. At that point, the caramel was mostly solid, but a bit squishy, so I believe that’s a good point to get the salt to stick and not dissolve.