People ask me this one at the tasting counter more than you'd think. Somebody picks up a piece of our almond butter toffee, then a sea salt caramel, and says, "Aren't these the same thing?" Fair question. They start in the same place. Sugar, butter, heat. But they end up in very different spots, and the reason is pretty simple once you see it in the kitchen.
Here's the short version. Caramel is made with cream and milk and cooked to a lower temperature, so it stays soft and chewy. Toffee is made with butter and sugar, no cream, and cooked a lot hotter, so it sets up hard and snaps. Same family. Different finish line.
What goes in the pot
I pulled up our own recipes for this, because that's the honest way to answer it.
Our butter toffee is mostly butter and sugar. Butter is about 30 percent of the batch, sugar a little over 40, and the rest is almonds, a pinch of Maldon sea salt, a splash of water and a touch of lecithin. That's it. No cream, no milk.
Our chewy caramel looks totally different on paper. Cream is a quarter of the batch, whole milk another 17 percent, then sugar, butter, glucose, salt and a little cocoa butter at the end. When you run the numbers, the caramel formula carries about three times the water of the toffee. All that dairy is where caramel gets its soft, milky body.
Where the thermometer stops
This is the part that really matters.
For toffee, we bring the butter and water to a boil, stir in the sugar and cook it to about 250°F. Then the roasted almonds go in and we keep going to 290 to 300°F. That's the hard crack stage. Almost all of the water is gone. We pull it off the heat, spread it out fast and cut it before it fully sets, because once it sets you're not cutting anything. You're breaking it.
Caramel goes the other direction. We melt the sugar on its own until it turns a medium brown, then carefully pour in hot cream (it will bubble up on you, so respect it). Then the butter goes in and we cook it gently up to 116 to 118°C, which is about 241 to 244°F. On my recipe card I actually wrote myself a note: "116C is soft, preferable caramel." I like it on the soft side. A couple degrees higher and you've got something firmer that fights your teeth.
So the difference you feel when you bite into them comes down to water. Toffee is cooked until there's almost none left, so it shatters. Caramel keeps a lot more of it, so it bends and stretches.
The taste is different too
Toffee tastes like browned butter and toasted nuts. The butter and sugar cook together long enough that you get those deep roasted notes, and the almonds roast right along with it.
Caramel tastes like burnt sugar and cream. You get that slightly bitter edge from taking the sugar dark first, then the dairy rounds it out. That's why a little sea salt on top works so well. It wakes the whole thing up.
How we treat them in the kitchen
Both are fussy, just in different ways. With caramel it's texture. We taste test every batch, and not long ago Melanie and I walked through the factory and pulled some caramels that were too soft. As I said on our podcast that day, "They taste delicious, but we didn't like the texture." They didn't go out. We ate them, which is not the worst problem to have.
Toffee taught us a different lesson. It was already a good seller, and we still changed it. On the podcast I put it this way: "We didn't just change the packaging, we changed the shape of the product." We went from little bonbon-sized squares, maybe an inch across, to bigger pieces almost the size of a graham cracker, and Melanie put them in packaging where you could actually see them. Same toffee. It flew off the shelf.
Which one should you pick?
Honestly, whichever one makes you happy. That's really our motto at Hill Country Chocolate, make people happy, and I don't think anybody should be pretentious about candy. If you want something to snap and crunch with a glass of wine, go toffee. If you want something that melts slow and sticks around, go caramel.
Or do what most people at our counter end up doing and try one of each.
