Try explaining English toffee to somebody who’s only ever had caramel and you end up talking about heat, because that’s honestly the whole difference: it’s sugar and butter cooked up to a high temperature until it sets firm and snaps cleanly, usually with chocolate and chopped nuts on top, while caramel gets cooked lower and stays soft and chewy. The name gets tossed around pretty loosely too, for buttercrunch-style toffee on both sides of the Atlantic.
Toffee vs caramel
Both start out as sugar and butter, which surprises people where they part ways is how hot the pot gets. Take it hot enough and it goes hard and brittle with a clean snap that’s toffee. Stop sooner and you’ve got something soft and chewy, which is caramel. English toffee lives firmly in the snappy camp.
What “English toffee” means
Over in Britain the word “toffee” stretches across a whole family of butter sweets, hard ones and chewy ones both. In North America though, “English toffee” nearly always means buttercrunch, the hard buttery kind coated in chocolate and almonds, so you’ll probably run into both uses depending on who you’re talking to. That caramelized butter flavor runs through all of it either way.
Stocking English toffee
Boxed toffee does well around the holidays since it keeps and makes a decent gift we think of it as a dependable specialty or seasonal line. The toffee and caramel category is the place to start there are some British UK lines too if you’re building out a selection.
FAQ
What is English toffee?
A hard, buttery sweet cooked hot until it sets firm and snaps, with chocolate and chopped nuts usually on top.
What is the difference between toffee and caramel?
It comes down to temperature. Toffee’s cooked hotter so it sets hard and brittle with a clean snap caramel stays cooler and ends up soft and chewy.