Some Caribbean recipes, such as this Jamaican oxtail stew, ask for browning sauce, which is essentially burnt sugar:
Heat a large Dutch oven or a heavy-bottomed pot over high heat. Add brown sugar to pot and melt, stirring with a wooden spoon, until it darkens and starts to smoke — about six minutes. When sugar is nearly black, add 2 tablespoons boiling water. (It will splatter.) Stir to mix.
This does add a lot of smokey-sweet flavour, nice bitterness, and rich dark brown colour to the stew, which I'd like to keep. However, this also results, after a couple of hours on the stove, in the bottom of the pan being covered by what amounts to charcoal that's almost impossible to clean by non-abrasive means.
Since the recipes also often include acidy ingredients, I'd prefer to use enamel pots instead of stainless steel, which makes cleaning the burnt sugar residue without damaging enamel a multi-day challenge.
Is there a trick for removing burnt sugar from enamel surfaces? Alternatively, how can I achieve the browning sauce effect without it sticking to the pot?
Best Answer
I would do this in a non-stick pan, then throw this into the stew/pot, usually with some meat or something else first in the pot you are stewing in. The reason it sticks, is b/c sugar tends to stay together, so if sugar is at the bottom of a pan it draws more sugar to the bottom, along with all the browned meat bits. I also like to de-glaze the pot you brown the meat in for more flavor and less cleaning.