Ticking off the holy trinity of sugar, salt and fat – salted caramel is the class A drug of the confectionery world, says Nigella Lawson.

I am in the middle of a love affair with salted caramel. It’s heady, it’s passionate, it may – like the stalker’s obsessive focus – not be entirely healthy, but I take the view that few in this world have the luxury to be blasé about pleasure. There’s simply not enough of it about for us to gainsay what gifts are offered up for our enjoyment. True, for many, self-denial has its own exquisite agony, but I am not among their number. For me, a “more is more” kind of a person, I don’t want merely to experience pleasure, I want to wallow in it – gloriously and gratefully – while it lasts.

And this salted caramel thing has lasted. I am moving beyond the personal here. The history books have yet to be written, but all evidence points to the birth of salted caramel as being in late Seventies Brittany. The soon-to-be-trademarked (1981) Caramel au Beurre Salé made perfect geo-culinary sense, as salted butter from Brittany was a long-established speciality of the region. At this stage, however, salted caramel existed predominantly as a piece of confectionery, however exalted. But fast forward a decade, and Pierre Hermé, the French pâtissier known as “The Picasso of Pastry”, had created the salted caramel macaroon and there has been a sticky drip-drip of salted caramel ever since.

My first taste of this elixir was in the form of one of the liquid-centred, wafer-thin chocolate Os from L’Artisan du Chocolat quite a few years ago. In fact, they could be said to have started the salted caramel trend here, producing their first in 2003. Now they sell 50,000 boxes a year – more than any other chocolate on their production line.

Not since the first ever infant suckled at its mother’s breast had a food – it felt – had so much instant impact. If I’d been in a cartoon, my eyes would have bulged, stars would have emanated from my head, and I would have been licking my saliva-spurting lips wolfishly. It’s not a pretty picture, but I’m afraid an all-too-accurate description of what was actually the case. The best way I can describe this glory is that it was like an After Eight taken to some definitely grown-up and more heavenly arena: the chocolate casing consisting of two spheres, pressed together, dark and bitter, and trapped within not some sweet and sticky mint fondant, but a fierce golden trickle of a substance at once sweet, smokey, salty and utterly, indescribably beguiling.

See Nigella's recipe for salted caramel sauce

BRAIN FOOD

But if salted caramel came upon me like an epiphany, in truth I’d discovered the fatal lure of the sweet-salt axis some time before.

I’d always said to people that I didn’t really have a sweet tooth, but a salt tooth; given the choice between a chocolate cake and a whole baguette slathered with deliquescent, almost spookily saline blue cheese, it would be the savoury latter every time. Not, though, that I believe the realm of eating should be an either/or universe. But then I discovered something better than sweet, something better than salty. It was the two of them together. And not just the two of them, but one extra, indispensable ingredient: for what makes salted caramel, and its ilk, so irresistible is not so much a pairing, but a rapturous ménage a trois. Nothing, but nothing, can beat the holy trinity of fat, sugar and salt. It is Aristotle’s Golden Mean in food form.

Detractors point out that when sugar, salt and fat are ramped up in combination with another, the foodstuff in question has an effect on the human brain rather like drugs. In a heady combination, they stimulate neurons, which release dopamine, the neurotransmitter associated with the pleasure centre, which in turn makes us want to eat more. There is an explosiveness to this combination that does get the pulse racing and the adrenaline flowing. Part of this is down to the immoderate intensity of the flavours: the combination is somehow so surprising, and yet so compelling.

"My love affair with salted caramel"