A lot of recipes suggest adding corn syrup or honey to the sugar in order to make crystallization less likely. I’m not in the US, so corn syrup pretty much doesn’t exist, but I have a jar of raw and therefore very crystalized honey that I got from a friend who keeps bees. Will using that still help? I’m thinking that all the imperfections like pollen or wax in raw honey will just make the caramel even more likely to crystalize.
I think you need a starch to prevent crystallization. You might have better luck adding rice/potato/corn starch to make sure the caramels come out creamy. Also this is mostly relevant to soft caramels, if you’re making caramel hard candies you can probably just allow a certain amount of crystallization.
Interesting, never heard of starches being used for that. All I found online suggested invert sugar like corn syrup or some type of acid, for example lemon juice. And yes, I’m going for a soft, chewy texture.
So the trick with starches are that you’re adding the thick gooeyness manually instead of relying on the specific temperature transformation of the sugar. It essentially let’s you cheat since you only need to toast the sugar for flavor and the starch will emulate the firm ball texture.
I’d note that you can make a gooey caramel with only sugar though but you really want a candy thermometer because you’re dealing with pretty precise ranges of temperatures here king arthur flour has a good breakdown of what’s going on and if you want to make it starchless this will probably help: https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/blog/2022/12/12/how-to-make-caramel