Jamaican Browning Sauce
By: AuthorChef Lola's Kitchen, https://cheflolaskitchen.com/
Browning sauce is a condiment made from a perfect blend of brown sugar and water. This sauce adds bitter-sweet caramel flavor and an exotic hue to your meal. Easy and fast to make, adding excellent flavoring to soups, stews, barbecues, and cakes. Jamaican Browning Sauce is a classic condiment for dishes like brown chicken stew, jerk chicken, oxtail, pork chops, peas and rice, stew beef, shrimp, fried fish, and even black cake.
This sauce features smoky, slightly bitter, and sweet tastes that caramelize pleasantly in your mouth. It adds a distinct sweet molasses flavor to your dish. Ensure that you add the sauce moderately to avoid a bitter taste. Asides from enhancing food flavor, this sauce gives food a rich and exotic brown color. It is one of the ultimate secrets of food like pot roast.
Sugar and water are the only two ingredients you need to make browning sauce. Although, you can buy it in a bottle. However, making it is just as easy; it is much cheaper and has no preservatives. Browning sauce combines brown sugar and hot boiling water to form a syrup-like sauce. While boiling the brown sugar, it caramelizes and forms a brown syrup which you then add water to for consistency.
The store bought browning is more concentrated, and bitter, than the homemade version, and a little goes a long way.
If for whatever you should need a substitute the closest would be molasses, it shares a similar dark hue, although molasses has slightly more sweet hint and is thicker in texture.
Jamaican Browning Sauce
1 cup Brown Sugar packed
1/2 cup hot boiling Water
Heat the sugar: Add the brown sugar to a medium saucepan and heat over medium-low heat.
Melt the sugar into syrup: Stir with a wooden spoon until the brown sugar melts and becomes a dark syrup. Once the sugar turns to a very dark almost black colour, it will begin to bubble (don't let it go too black or it will be too bitter).
Note: Decrease the heat if the liquid begins to smoke before it turns dark. A stronger taste of smoke will permeate your sauce if you let it cook for too long. Therefore, It is very important to strike the right balance.
Add boiling water: Once the color changes from amber to black, remove it from the stove and slowly add the boiling water, a little at a time. Be aware that the sauce will splatter at this point, so protect your hands. DO NOT use cold water as this will ruin the recipe because the sugar will harden and not dissolve.
Let it rest, store or use: Allow the sauce to cool to room temperature, and pour into an airtight container. Use as needed or store in the refrigerator. The sauce will last for up to 6 months in the fridge.
This version doesn’t have salt, but you can add a pinch of salt if you won’t be using the sauce on the cake.
Note: If you're browning is lumpy, return it to the stove on very low heat and stir until the hard sugar lumps begin to dissolve (it should take a few minutes to liquidise). You can then continue with bottling it up once it has cooled down.
Tips for making Browning Sauce
- Cook the sugar on medium to low heat to prevent the sugar from burning.
- Ensure that the kitchen is adequately ventilated in case there’s an accumulation of smoke from the process. Open the window or on the fan extractor to reduce smoke.
- If the sugar begins to smoke too quickly then reduce the flame or switch off the stove and continue to stir while charring the sugar.
- I recommend using a non-stick saucepan so that the stirring process is smooth and less messy. It is also easy to clean up a non-stick saucepan.
- Also, use a large saucepan to reduce the risk of accidents when the sugar splutters or rises.
