Share
The donkey caramel sauce first came into glory in 2018, when Serendipity, a restaurant in New York won the record for the most expensive milkshake in the world. A milkshake which would averagely run you about a dollar or two in the US was being sold at the restaurant for a whopping $100. The milkshake was made with premium milk, Tahitian vanilla ice cream, edible gold, maraschino cherries and topped with a drizzle of Le Cremose Baldizzone or as Donkey caramel sauce.
The recipe of the donkey caramel sauce is protected like a state secret and to even gather any information about the sauce, one requires Italian to English translation. The rarer sauce is created from just four ingredients: fresh donkey milk, brown sugar, Piedmont hazelnuts, and Venezuelan cocoa which give the sauce a lovely yet unique taste.
Despite the shock factor, donkey milk is used because of its distinct flavour that actually resembles mother’s milk. Cane brown sugar is used in place white sugar to reduce calories and up the nutrient profile of the sauce. Though the caramel was deadly unhealthy, the idea behind it was to create a luxe product with just the right amount of sugar and calories and the “oh” factor. Venezuelan cocoa is supposed to be the best in the world, and Venezuela does even produce large quantities of it. Another interesting fact is that even though the sauce has chocolatey notes, their usage of raw sugar and their cooking of it has made the caramel notes very strong and as result, despite looking like a chocolate sauce it actually tastes like caramel with hints of chocolate.
The nuttiness comes from Piedmont hazelnuts which aren’t like your average Nutella hazelnuts but in fact, these nuts are only grown two months of the year and much more expensive than the garden variety of hazelnuts.
As to how you can get your hands on this stuff; no grocery store in Indian would stock this, because it’s absolutely absurd and ridiculously expensive. But if you have taste for this stuff you can express order from the manufacturers and that’s the only way to get it.
