Gooey, sweet, thick. Looks and tastes similar to caramel but with a much smoother, easily spread texture. It’s incredibly sweet but delicious and incredibly common in breakfast pastries, desserts and sweets of all kinds here - from dulce de leche flavored ice cream to cookies called alfajores, which are sort of like really fantastic oreos with soft cookies on the outside and dulce de leche in the middle.

The story goes that dulce de leche originated in Argentina in 1829 when a servant was preparing warm sweetened milk for some soldiers. When she forgot about la lechada, the burnt sugar/milk became a dark brown substance that looked like jelly and eventually became the popular dulce de leche. In Chile, it’s known as manjar.

When I made this with Cheesemaker, we used really large portions, but this can obviously be done in normal sizes. Many people use condensed milk at home so they have to cook it down less (and because fresh milk isn’t available in all of the countries that people eat dulce de leche). There’s also dulce de leche with goat’s milk and soy milk in the stores…

First we stirred 4.4 pounds sugar into 7 1/2 quarts cold milk until it dissolved. (The numbers are so odd because they’ve been translated from metric units.) Then we added 2 teaspoons baking soda before putting the giant pot on the stove over a medium flame. The baking soda makes the milk grow as you are cooking it, even though it eventually cooks down into about three quarts. We stirred the milk/sugar combo every 20 or so minutes for 2 1/2 to 3 hours until we ended up with a thick but somewhat viscous substance.