A watercolour of a bowl of mixed tinned fruit with thick brown caramel poured over and flaked almonds on top
Generated with OpenAI gpt-image-1
Adapted from Dulce de leche

Fruit cocktail with burnt condensed milk

An established dish converted to shelf-stable ingredients. Every substitution is documented below.

How long it keeps

About 12 months, set by Fruit cocktail (tinned, in juice).

Indicative, for planning a build before you buy. The answer for a pack you already own is the best before date printed on it, and that only holds if it has been stored as the label says.

Serves
3
Burners
1
Pans
1
Water
0.05 L
Active
10 min
Total
15 min

Ingredients

Do not boil a sealed tin. The traditional way to make dulce de leche is to simmer an unopened tin of condensed milk for three hours. It works, and it is three hours of gas, and a tin left to boil dry can burst. Opening it and cooking it in a pan takes eight minutes.

  1. Almonds toasted dry, tipped out.
  2. Condensed milk into the pan over a low heat with the salt. It catches and scorches easily, so keep it low and keep stirring.
  3. Eight to ten minutes, stirring almost constantly, until it turns from cream to a proper fudge-brown and thickens. It will look unchanged for five minutes and then move quickly. Stay with it.
  4. Drained fruit cocktail into bowls, the warm caramel poured over, almonds on top.

The salt is what stops it being flatly sweet, and a pinch more than feels right is usually correct.

Serves 3.

What this was adapted from

Dulce de leche: the Latin American caramel made by cooking condensed milk

  • condensed milk simmered in the unopened tin for three hours → condensed milk caramelised in a pan in eight minutes

    The traditional method boils a sealed tin for hours, which is a fuel cost and carries a real risk of the tin bursting. Cooking it in an open pan takes eight minutes, uses a fraction of the gas, and is considerably safer -- at the cost of a looser, less uniform caramel.