This is my favorite, go-to salted butter caramel sauce. There are no real tricks or fancy techniques. And while staying in friend’s houses, I realized I didn’t have my usual arsenal of equipment so was limited in what I could make. This post raised the ire of some, who thought it wasn’t polite to bring cooking equipment when staying with others, but if you’ve tried to dice an onion with a butter knife or make a cake in an oven that has two settings; on, and off, you realize that good equipment does make cooking and baking easier.

I begged off baking anything because I’m in the midst of working on a book and wasn’t up for a scavenger hunt for ingredients and tools, which can happen in the countryside in France, when even food shops are closed, as everyone deserves a break. (Except for writers.)

While I am sort of on vacation this summer, when Romain made my ridiculously easy Chocolate Idiot Cake, and I was able to pull myself away from my writing to make add this sauce, to serve alongside.

it’s a shame that salted butter has been demonized by the baking community for so long. I, too, was probably guilty of that. But I’ve changed my tune and have apologized for it. Salted butter adds a deeper butter flavor to baked goods, like chocolate chip cookies, chocolate sauce, and French sablés (butter cookies), for example. The late Judy Rodgers made excellent puff pastry with salted butter as well.

Gone are the days when salt was added to preserve freshness (thankfully, most of us have refrigeration now) and the best quality butter I’ve had was in Normandy and Brittany, where salted butter is the name of the game.

In France, we’re fortunate to get beurre demi-sel, and butter with sizable crystals of sea salt in it. There are no hard and fast rules for how much salt is in salted butter, but if you want to use unsalted butter, for every 4 ounces/115g, there’s approximately 1/4 teaspoon of salt added.