Caramel chocolate from Tiroler Edle made with Grey Cattle cream
Caramel chocolate from Tiroler Edle is a filled bar with a center cooked down from fresh cream, butter, and a touch of honey. The filling remains spreadable, gives way at the first touch, and coats the piece softly.
Caramel chocolate is the filled caramel bar from Tiroler Edle in Landeck, Tyrol. The 100-gram bar combines a milk chocolate with 39 percent cocoa and a premium caramel made from the cream of Grey Cattle, slowly browned with butter and honey.
Buttery, honey-sweet, with a light toasted note
The chocolate snaps when broken, revealing a caramel underneath that slowly gives way instead of flowing.
First, you taste the butter, warm and full, followed by the honey with its floral sweetness, and finally the toasted note of the browned sugar. The surrounding milk chocolate is kept light enough so as not to disrupt this sequence and to let the sweetness of the caramel shine through.
Because the caramel is cooked from cream, it remains creamy and melts together with the chocolate instead of outlasting it. The honey ensures that the sweetness remains floral and does not fall flat.
Why this caramel remains soft
A caramel becomes hard or soft long before it goes into the mold, and that is determined by the ingredients.
Pure sugar crystallizes upon cooling, resulting in the hard candy one knows from a tin box. Honey adds fructose and glucose, which settle between the crystals and disrupt their structure, keeping the mixture supple.
Fat does the rest: butter and cream surround the sugar particles and keep them at a distance. That is why this filling can be moved with a spoon, whereas a sugar caramel would have become stiff in the same amount of time. This is why Tiroler Edle adds butter and fresh cream to the pot together.
The cream a good caramel needs
The color of the caramel is not only due to the sugar, but also the cream in the pot.
Milk sugar and protein brown in the heat as well, bringing those deep, almost malty tones that a caramel made from water and sugar can never reach. The richer the cream, the fuller this tone becomes, and the less time it needs to be cooked.
Tiroler Edle uses cream from the Grey Cattle, an old mountain cattle breed that yields little milk but is rich in quality. Its fat carries the sweetness and rounds off the toasted note that emerges during browning.
With coffee, on warm ice cream, by the spoonful
The warmer the bar is, the softer the caramel becomes; in the refrigerator, it contracts.
A strong coffee stands up to the sweetness, a black tea does the same with less emphasis, and on a scoop of vanilla ice cream, a piece melts in seconds. Do not place the bar next to spices or coffee, as the fat in the caramel readily absorbs external odors. With a glass of milk, it tastes most like childhood; with an aged rum, it tastes like evening.
For spooning onto bread, the premium caramel in a jar is available alongside it. For comparison, other chocolate bars are ready, as is the rest of the Tiroler Edle assortment.
