How to Make Dulce de Leche

I took note of the caution about using metal cans as cooking utensils and decided to transfer the sweetened condensed milk into a ball canning glass jar. I left the top slightly loose for venting. I did everything else as written. It came out great. This offered three advantages, first I was able to see the progress of the test batch and avoided the danger of unwanted chemicals leaching into the Dulce De Leche, and finally, when it was finished it was already in its storage container! (Not that it was "stored" for very long!)

Never heat food in a can. Cans are lined with BPA and/or other toxic chemicals. Heating cans leaches the chemicals into food - particularly fatty foods like milk! The EPA and FDA both has publications informing people not to use cans in this way! Use a double-boiler to make this recipe.

This is excellent! It's helpful to have a large pan of simmering water on the stove to maintain the water level in the small pan without changing the water temperature. I simmered mine exactly for 3 hours because I wanted it somewhat thin to spread on top of a Tres Leche cake. 3 hours is a long time, but as long as I checked it often and maintained the water level to an inch below the top, it was as easy as it gets. It was so delicious that I had to stop myself from eating it right out of the can! Much better than anything in the store.

Just FYI, it’s pronounced “dool-say” not “dol-che.”

Great Recipe! I had a spare can of sweetened condensed milk. With the wonderful cross-filing system of Allrecipes, it was easy to find a recipe using that (one!) ingredient . Marysunshine1's suggestion of the extra pan of simmering water will ease the process and is especially good since we can nearly always use extra humidity.

Make sure your can is magnetic with a common fridge magnet to assure its safe to boil! Otherwise this recipe works great!!!!! I made it to put in my dulce de leche apple empanadas ??

I followed the recipe exactly with 2 nail holes on top and cooked the canned condensed milk for a little over four hours. When I open the cans, they looked exactly like uncooked condensed milk, just runny and not done at all! Very disappointed as I need this for my daughter's Spanish class today and we have nothing!

I made it, and when it cools down its really thick but it works....

Excellent, easy and delicious. You can cook it to a thicker or even soft solid consistency also. Be very careful to keep a close watch that the water does all evaporate!

Great recipe to know thank you for posting!! I've done this once already and nobody could believe how simple and delicious it is. Could save you that extra trip to the store!!!

Followed recipe to a T. Always watching water level. Found 15 minutes safe interval. Oh so good!

Very simple recipe that produced good results. We let the sweetened condensed milk simmer for an extra hour as we didn’t notice the expected brown colour of the dulce de leche on the top of the can. Even after that upon opening the can the top was still pale. However after stirring the can we noticed the lower three quarters of the milk had the expected medium brown colour. We needed the dulce de leche for a cake and it worked very well. I think that next time we’ll simply empty the condensed milk into a bowl placed within a pan of water then follow the boiling and simmering instructions. We’ll be able to stir the mixture from time to time to ensure a consistent mix throughout.