Recipe: Salted Tablet

Salted everything is all the rage at the moment; salted caramel, salted chocolate, salted honeycomb. I was inspired to make this salted tablet after after kindly receiving a packet of Burnt Sugar’s Sea Salt Caramel Fudge for Christmas from my Aunt. It was totally delicious, however I found the texture to be closer to that of Scottish tablet rather than that of traditional English fudge.

For those of you not familiar with tablet, it is a Scottish sweet that has often been described as fudge’s grainy Scottish cousin. It has a much more brittle and grainy texture than fudge, which is usually much softer and smoother. Furthermore, tablet requires the use of condensed milk rather than cream as the main liquid component.

So I couldn’t find the recipe for Burnt Sugar’s Salted Caramel Fudge, but I did find a recipe from the Cornish Sea Salt Company’s website, where again, they call it salted FUDGE, but the recipe is much closer to that of Scottish tablet. It would therefore appear that many companies from below the border have adopted the tablet recipe, but marketed it as fudge.   I guess this is because tablet is just not as well known down there.

As I am in Scotland I thought I would stick to tradition and call it tablet. Any of you fudge/tablet connoisseurs out there can have a look at the recipe and let me know if you think I was right in my decision to rename.

For this recipe I decided to add a bit more salt than they suggested, but it is really up to personal preference how much you add. If you are feeling adventurous you could always stick with the Scottish theme and add a dash of whisky. After all, it is nearly Rabbie Burns Day!

Prep Time: 40 mins

Makes: One 20cm block of Tablet. The amount of pieces depend on what size you chose to make them.

Ingredients:

397g Can of Carnation Condensed Milk

150ml Milk

450g Dememera Sugar

115g Butter

2 Teaspoons of Sea Salt

1 Tsp Vanilla Extract

Method:

 1. First you need to line a 20 cm square tin with baking parchment.

2. Place the condensed milk, milk, sugar and butter in a large heavy-based pan.

3. Stir over a low heat until the sugar has dissolved. Then bring to the boil and simmer, over a low heat, for 10-15 minutes, stirring continuously and scraping the base of the pan.

4. You can test if the mixture is ready by dropping a teaspoonful of the mixture into cold water. If it forms a soft ball, it is ready.

5. Stir in the Salt and the vanilla extract.

6. Remove the pan from the heat and leave to cool for about five minutes then beat the mixture vigorously until it becomes thick and grainy.

7. Pour the mixture into the prepared tin, sprinkle it with salt and leave to cool and set before breaking it up into chunks.

You can cut it in to squares, but I find it is so sweet that a wee chunk is more than enough to satisfy a sweet tooth!