SAME! My local mexican grocery has cajeta paletas and they are Amazing.
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Cajeta is too funky for my tastes, but like other dulce de leche it still lacks the complexity and bitterness that comes from burnt sugar that I love so much.
I don’t love the goat milk flavor in cajeta either.
I find dulce the leche more complex than most caramel, which never gets to the burnt sugar flavor, which I love.
I remember making flan once for a party at a friend’s, and she couldn’t “get” the difference in flavor between bland caramel and just-the-other side of burnt sugar (“it tastes weird”). Sigh.
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Dulce de leche relies on Maillard browning rather than caramelization, so it never achieves any bitterness from burnt sugar, but it does achieve other flavors that caramel doesn’t. Baking soda gives it characteristic toastiness, which I don’t really care for even though I love alkaline flavor in things like pretzels and ramen noodles. You can make French confiture de lait which doesn’t contain baking soda, and as a result is much paler, but dulce de leche gets baking soda for its flavor and color. It’s a very present flavor for me in store-bought dulce de leche particularly, and yet paradoxically store-bought also tastes acidic to me. Homemade is much tastier to me, but I still find dulce de leche to be very sweet, whereas caramel has this great balance.
A lot of caramel is undercooked so it’s too pale and sweet and as a result very disappointing. Flan with a pale caramel tastes blandly sweet.
The only method I’ve come across for dulce de leche is cooking a can of condensed milk (or cooking down condensed milk from a can). Always been curious how it was made before that.
Baking soda speeds up browning but I’m sensitive to the flavor it adds so I skip or reduce in it almost everything that calls for it.
Many Indian milk sweets call for milk to be significantly reduced - with or without browning depending on the dish. No baking soda, ever, though. Takes a lot patience, lol.
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I’ve always made it with milk and sugar so I’ve actually never made it from condensed milk, but yeah still Maillard browning.
I made a really nice version once with coconut milk and coconut sugar and a shot of rum.
In the case of dulce de leche the baking soda is a part of it because it contributes to the flavor, color, and the texture, not for speeding up the process, which is still decently long. It still browns if you don’t have any baking soda, but not to the same degree. It’s the same process as the Indian recipes I’ve seen.
Manjar blanco, which is a much paler version of dulce de leche, contains no baking soda (and it tends to contain more sugar than dulce de leche in order to achieve its consistency while retaining a pale color). I think it’s why some people insist it’s better than dulce de leche even if they can’t point to that reason specifically. Most people seem to use evaporated milk to make it rather than fresh milk these days, which makes sense given that a pale color is desired.
This article outlines how dulce de leche and cajeta work and how they differ:
The first time I tasted cajeta was when a friend from Mexico gave me some candy and I wondered why one of them tasted like barnyard. I was not a fan. 
But it can work in certain contexts.
I don’t mind cajeta, like goat cheese. I just prefer the non-goat versions!
Interesting read. They have one on Dulce de Leche methods too (reads like it was probably originally just milk & sugar, baking soda came later)
In any case, I want to make some now! (But I usually end up just eating the condensed milk I buy instead of cooking it, lol.)
I love the barnyard flavor. I like goat cheese that tastes gamy or as a chef friend puts it, “You like to taste the teat.”.
Once at the farmers’ market I was offered a sample of goat milk. I was disappointed that it tasted just like cows’ milk at four times the price and said so. A woman next to me said that was the point. She believed goat milk to be better for ones’ health than cow milk, but she disliked the flavor of goat milk.
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Has anyone made Basbousa / have a recipe to recommend?
I forgot that I promised the team that I would bring in something on Monday (I remembered around 9:30 on Sunday night…) so scrambled for something quick that I had made before. I ended up making the simple sesame cake from Snacking Cakes https://www.thewednesdaychef.com/the_wednesday_chef/2021/02/yossy-arefis-simple-sesame-cake.html with the optional chocolate chips. The team seemed to like it… and I didn’t have to stay up too late!
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I do and will find them and put them out there!
I love this cake so much!
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Egg white disposal: white lemon cupcakes with raspberry filling and meringue frosting. Actually needed the filling to be less tart here. With strawberries it would have been perfect.
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Looked through a bunch of Basbousa recipes to bake a little one for our HO Egyptian group dinner last night.
I was really skeptical about this Egyptian semolina cake.
There is an Indian semolina dessert with virtually identical ingredients (rava no sheero / suji ka halwa) - semolina is lightly roasted with ghee (or oil), then sugar, water or milk is added, which the semolina absorbs and fluffs up. Finally, flavorings are added (cardamom, saffron, nuts). This is eaten as with a spoon, like a firm pudding.
For basbousa, the semolina is mixed with butter or ghee, then mixed with a liquid until it absorbs it and looks sandy. It’s then pressed into a greased baking dish and baked. You make a sugar syrup while it bakes, and then pour that over the cake and let it soak in.
Recipes vary on what the liquid addition is (yogurt vs milk vs water), what the sugar syrup proportion and viscosity are, and various other tweaks like resting the semolina before baking, resting it after soaking, what flavorings are added, and so on.
I used a combination of greek yogurt and water, cut back on the sugar for the syrup, and used both rose and orange blossom water for flavor. I rested the semolina mixture for a few hours before baking as one of the recipes suggested. I let the syrup soak in overnight, covered in the warm oven, as another did.
The outcome was much more delicious than I expected (expectation was low because I didn’t follow one single recipe, which can often result in disaster). I asked the owner/chef of the Egyptian restaurant to have a taste and be honest – he said it was very good, but next time I should rest the semolina an entire day before baking to let the tang of the yogurt develop more.
I didn’t have room for dessert after that massive meal, but there was a piece left that came home with me, and it was delicious today – the rose and orange blossom really shone through. I might actually make this again, but I’ll follow a single recipe so I can get to a better texture for the cake (this was a bit crumbly vs. what I imagine it’s supposed to be from pictures). There are cheat versions that use eggs (even Ottolenghi has a few semolina cakes soaked in syrup that I can only imagine are riffs on basbousa, but I don’t want to add eggs if the original recipe doesn’t need them).
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I also baked half a batch of brownies (Medrich brown butter no nuts) because we had a birthday girl who likes chocolate.
I’m a bit puzzled by the crust, which is usually glossy — I specially bought white sugar for this too (I only stick turbinado otherwise).
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Did you check Middle Eats? He usually goes in depth into the recipes. I have never had any interest in basbousa and I’ve never made it, so I can’t vouch for the recipe, but he usually has good information if nothing else:
This Turkish version has some very good reviews:
It strikes me that it must be quite sweet, though.
Which of Medrich’s brownie recipes is that?
I don’t use YouTube a lot, thank you for the links. (I found some Egyptian blogger recipes with pretty helpful explanations of why to do certain things or not.)
This dish is ubiquitous across the Middle East, it seems, with different names. So there are likely many, many versions. Some are firm, some are creamy, most are a thin layer, but looks like the Turkish and Greek versions are thicker. Also interesting that the Turkish recipe you linked had no ghee or any fat in the batter. The Egyptian recipes did not result in a batter at all, rather a dry mix that was pressed into the pan. They also distinguished between home style basbousa and shop bought, which apparently have different textures (and probably flavors). All very interesting, and very similar to variations in any Indian sweet!
I even found boxed basbousa mix at the little grocery store near the Egyptian restaurant!
Medrich’s cocoa brown butter brownies are my go-to starting point.
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I figured it was the cocoa brownies. A lot of photos I’ve seen of those don’t have the thin, glossy crust that brownies typically have, so it seems to happen with decent regularity. Usually comes down to how much mixing is done of the sugar with the other ingredients.
Although I’m a big Medrich fan and the cocoa brownies are among her most popular recipes, I’ve never gotten around to making them since I like her new bittersweet brownies from Pure Dessert. Plus I don’t really like brownies much overall so almost never think to bake any.
I’ll have to look at those.
I’ve not had an issue with the crust except when I didn’t have white sugar at hand and substituted turbinado.
Actually i now recall a whole discussion on brownie crust.
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