A quick and easy recipe for 4-ingredient date caramel sauce made from medjool dates. Perfect as a dip or topping for healthy treats. Vegan and gluten-free.
Just popping in with a quick recipe for my homemade date caramel sauce today. This recipe has been in my post drafts since last year and for whatever reason I never got around to posting it. I feel awful because I made you live an whole year without sharing this gem.
I’m truly sorry because it’s legit the perfect complement to a fresh picked apple. Speaking of which, have you been apple picking this fall yet? I went with a friend to Carter Mountain (right outside of Charlottesville) last month on the way home from the Veritas yoga retreat. The weather was blazing hot, but it was still fun.
I brought home a huge bag of fresh apples and polished them off way too fast. I totally had plans to bake something delicious, maybe this vegan gluten-free apple crisp or perhaps these apple pie squares, but I ended up just chopping up an apple (sometimes two) a day and eating them as a snack.
I blame this date caramel sauce.
It’s too good to resist. And I love that it’s made with real food, simple ingredients (fresh medjool dates, almond milk, sea salt and vanilla). That’s it!
This date caramel is sweet and delicious. It definitely still has sugar, but I love that the dates are able to provide the rich sweet caramel flavor along with fiber and host of other vitamins and minerals. Medjool dates are a great source of potassium, copper, magnesium, vitamin B6, niacin, calcium, iron and vitamin K.
Added bonus, there’s no heavy cream or butter involved so this caramel is dairy-free and vegan. Boom!
I hope you enjoy it as much as we do. I’ll be share some fun recipes that include this date caramel so be on the look out for those soon.
4-Ingredient Date Caramel
Ingredients
- 16 medjool dates, pitted*
- 1 teaspoon sea salt
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 1/2 unsweetened almond milk (store-bought or homemade)
Instructions
- Add all ingredients into a high powered blender or food processor and blend until mixture is smooth and there are no date chunks detectable.
- Add more almond milk if needed to help the blending process or to thin the caramel. Use immediately or store in the fridge for later.
Recipe Notes
*Recipe works best fresh, soft medjool dates. If dates are dry or hard, you can soak them in water for about 30 minutes, drain and then use them in the recipe. If you're using smaller dates, you'll need to use more! This is something you can play around with to get the caramel sauce thickness you're looking for.
If you make this date caramel sauce let me know how it turns out in the comment section or share a photo on social media. Just be sure to tag me (@eatingbirdfood + #eatingbirdfood) so that I see it!
Can this be done with cow’s milk?
I haven’t tried it, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t work! Let me know if you try it. 🙂
YUM! I am obsessed with dates and had no idea that had so many health benefits too. More reasons to eat them!
Ok…I’m putting this on everything!! Can’t wait to see what you make with this!
Brittany, do you think coconut milk would work, as well? We have an almond allergy in the fam!
Hi Linda. Yes, I think coconut milk (or any other milk) will work great!
Yum, I had been meaning to try making date caramel, thanks for the recipe!
This is amazing! Only problem I had was having enough volume of mixture in my Vitamix so I had to keep scraping it down. I was never really able to blend all the date pieces up, but that did not affect the taste. Dunked my fresh Honeycrisp apples in the “caramel.” WOW!!!