While preparing a chemistry presentation, I came across a book describing research chemists by giving each person two pages – one describing their research interests and results, and one for a recipe. Given that I was looking for something different, the only thing that stuck with me was the exceptional simplicity of the recipe for dulce de leche (immediately reminding me of a dot-com era business plan):

1. Put a can of condensed milk (the sweetened kind!) into boiling water.
2. Boil for two to three hours.
3. ???
4. Profit!

The ??? part is apparently called a Maillard reaction and magically creates caramelly goodness (the linked Wikipedia article is slightly weird since it claims that Maillard reactions are only significant at temperatures above the boiling point of water, citing a reference that makes no such claims). Since my condensed milk came in a tube instead of a can, I was a bit nervous about pressure issues, but it seems that Nestlé’s packaging engineers overspecified enough to make it work.

Two-and-a-half hours of boiling got me a distinctly unrunny consistency, which tends to stay in shape against gravity’s meager coupling constant, even when poured on ice cream or such (which, due to certain associations most people have with piles of brown sausagy stuff, is not so great for the enterprising host). Maybe I’ll give it a little less time on the next run.