Mexican · Dessert
Cajeta de Celaya
- Advanced
- 1 h 45 m
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
- Vegan
Leads with richness that coats and comforts, warm spice humming through the middle, trailing gentle sweetness.
Ingredients
- 2000 ml goat's milk
- 400 g caster sugar
- 1.5 g bicarbonate of soda, dissolved in 15 ml water
- 1 cinnamon stick
- 5 ml vanilla extract
The skills inside
Allergen screen
None found among the 14 screened.
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Warm the milk with the sugar and cinnamon in your widest heavy pan over medium heat, stirring until no grit of sugar drags under the spoon.
- Pull the pan off the heat and stir in the dissolved bicarbonate of soda. It will foam up the sides at once, and it must fall back before the pan returns to the flame.
- Simmer at a lazy bubble, stirring every few minutes and scraping the corners, until the milk has gone from white through cream to the colour of weak tea, about an hour.
- Once it is the colour of wet sand, stand over it and stir without stopping. It is ready when a spoon dragged across the base leaves a channel that closes slowly, or at 105C to 107C (221F to 225F) on a probe.
- Stir in the vanilla and pour into warm jars while it still runs; it thickens by half again as it cools. Cool the jars, then keep them in the fridge and use within a month. This is not a shelf stable preserve, whatever the jars suggest.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Reducing a sauce 95 recipes
- A steady simmer with the surface moving, never a rolling boil that throws it up the sides and scorches what is left on the base.
- Judged by behaviour rather than the clock: it coats the back of a spoon and holds a clean line when a finger is drawn through it.
- The drop in volume is visible against the side of the pan: there is a line to see, not a guess about whether anything has happened.
- Seasoned at the end and not the beginning, because salt concentrates at exactly the rate everything else does.
- Nothing is catching underneath: a spoon drawn across the base comes up clean, with no browned film building where the heat is fiercest.
Where it goes wrong It was seasoned at the start and then reduced by half. The salt concentrated along with everything else, so the sauce reaches perfect body and is too salty to serve. And the only remedy is to dilute it and reduce it all over again.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Sauternes
- Also Right
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- Zero-Proof
- Jasmine tea
The sweetness rule is absolute: the pour must be sweeter than the plate, and acid keeps it from cloying.
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