Caramelized confection

"The heavy-set son ushered us down a narrow hallway toward a 15-gallon, hammered copper pot (the traditional cazo used for candy making) filled to the brim with today's goat milk. As we moved past it, the passage opened onto a narrow room with a 2-foot-high, bricked-in stove along one side. There, four more huge cazos boiled over strong gas jets. A barrel of sugar stood nearby with a wooden paddle propped up beside it; in the small bottling room at the end was a shelf that held baking soda, cinnamon, vanilla and alcohol, plus glass bottling jars in sizes from a cup to a quart."

Thus, Rick Bayless, owner of Chicago's Frontera Grill, perhaps this country's best Mexican restaurant, relates his first visit to the Cajeta Vencedora factory in Celaya, Guanajuato, where they make the definitive version of cajeta, the rich, thick, golden caramelized goat-milk confection that is as quintessentially Hispanic as apple pie is American.

Nearly 30 years ago my own first encounter with cajeta, during a visit to Mexico City, was not nearly as ceremonious, but it had every bit as much impact. One taste and I knew I would never again be satisfied with ordinary caramel sauce.

Lydia Martin, writing in the Houston Chronicle, calls cajeta (known variously as dulce de leche, fangullo, manjar blanco, and arequipe) the Ricky Martin of Latin desserts. "We don't all eat tacos, we don't all go for black beans and rice," she explains. "Some of us are into mango and guava; others prefer, well, chocolate," she continues. But cajeta, she maintains, is "the one thing almost all Hispanics, whether they're from Mexico, Cuba, Nicaragua or Argentina, can vibe together on." No wonder Haagen-Dazs' dulce de leche ice cream outsells vanilla 3-1 in Miami. For that matter, it's doing pretty well everywhere else too. It's now the company's second best selling flavor.

As Martin observes, cajeta is "kind of like caramel, only a whole lot sexier." Though it looks like caramel sauce, there the similarity ends. According to Bayless, in his latest book, "Mexico: One Plate At A Time," because it contains goat's milk its flavor is more intricate and because it is allowed to reduce in volume through slow simmering it is more concentrated in taste and color. He likens it to good wine: "silky-smooth, balanced and complex."

Technically speaking, cajeta isn't really caramel (which, as Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat tells us, was invented by the Arabs and used early on as a depilatory for harem ladies) because it does not contain caramelized sugar. Rather, its flavor and color are the result of browning milk solids, a process not unlike browning butter. Thus, cajeta recipes often call for the addition of baking soda which neutralizes acidity and promotes the browning. Indeed, Bayless reports that baking soda produces a golden brown color even when there is no sugar in the cajeta mixture. Occasionally, just for good measure, however, a bit of already caramelized sugar is added to the cajeta as it completes cooking, producing what is sometimes termed "cajeta quemada" or burnt cajeta. The name cajeta itself comes from the name of the small balsa-wood box or case (cajita) especially made to store the product before refrigeration was prevalent. Nowadays you're more likely to find the stuff packaged in glass jars.

Though cajeta can be found in abundance nearly anywhere south of the border, perhaps the most legendary version comes from the small town of Celaya in central Mexico. Cajeta was once such an integral part of that city's culture that, as Howard LaFranchi, writing in the Christian Science Monitor, notes, children there were traditionally taught to believe that the town's landmark turn-of-the-century water tower was filled to the top with it. Though factories have displaced many of Celaya's small family producers, there are still local cajeta-makers there determined to keep the old custom alive. Spurring them on are enough goats inhabiting the town's surrounding farmland to collectively produce some 10,000 quarts of milk a day.

You can follow the lead of the dulceros (sweet-makers) of Celaya and make your own cajeta. All that's required is a heavy pot, some goat's milk, and a lot of patience. But it's well worth doing, for home-made cajeta is bound to be superior to commercially produced versions which, as Diana Kennedy, America's maven of Mexican cuisine, notes, invariably suffer from short cuts such as the addition of cane syrup.

In a pinch you can always take a can of sweetened condensed milk and submerge it in boiling water for a few hours (be careful -- the danger of explosion is real enough that cans of Eagle Brand now carry a warning), but starting from scratch will produce something even more delicious -- and addictive.

Once you've made your first batch use it in place of pedestrian caramel sauce and you'll discover that cajeta makes a terrific topping for ice cream, a marvelous companion to fresh fruit such as pineapple, pears, or figs, a decadent filling for crepes, a transforming addition to your favorite pound cake recipe, and the secret ingredient to the best Bananas Foster you'll ever taste. You'll gladly discover these and many other uses for this caramely concoction, that is, if you can restrain yourself from simply eating it right out of the jar.

Listen to A Harte Appetite Fridays at 8:49 a.m. and Saturdays at 11:59 a.m. on KRCU, 90.9 FM. Write A Harte Appetite, c/o the Southeast Missourian, P.O. Box 699, Cape Girardeau, Mo., 63702-0699 or by e-mail to tharte@semissourian.com.