Make Ahead Easy Homemade Dulce de Leche

I’m someone who thinks dulce de leche makes everything taste better. It’s something that I enjoy licking right off the spoon. I’d freeze it into popsicles and devour them if I had my way. I digress.

When I’m baking, I sometimes get the brilliant idea of adding dulce de leche to a recipe to see how it would taste. There are also lots of recipes that do actually call for dulce de leche, like these delicious walnut-shaped cookies. Having a few cans at home can be really helpful.

Today, I’m going to share with you how you can make dulce de leche at home to save you time next time you’re baking.

It all starts with a can of sweetened condensed milk. Or four. Or ten. However much you want to keep in stock.

Things to remember:

You’ll want to boil water in a pot – enough so your can/cans are completely submerged throughout the entire process. 

Don’t get too impatient with the boiling process. It takes time for the condensed milk to cook and become dulce de leche. Two hours of boiling to be exact. No more, no less. Two hours is the sweet spot.

Let those cans rest. You need to give the cans time to cool down after they’ve been boiling for two hours. You can speed up the process by putting them in the refrigerator but I like to just let them come up to room temperature on the counter. 

So, that’s it! You’ve got your own little stock of dulce de leche that you can conveniently use whenever needed!

I like to make a few cans at a time, that way I could have some on hand if I would need when baking. After boiling you could leave in your pantry or in fridge (wherever you got some room), try to use during first three months after cooking, depending on the brand, after three months it could become sugary; which isn’t very good.