🇨🇴 Colombia
Arequipe
Usually a cow’s-milk-and-sugar spread, often cooked with a little bicarbonate. This is the name at the heart of this site.
First: it isn’t simply caramel.
Dulce de leche–style sweets get their color and flavor from slowly cooking milk with sugar. Traditional caramel begins with sugar itself. That milk changes the flavor, texture and browning chemistry.
And even inside the milk-caramel family, local versions may use different milks, ratios, aromatics and cooking methods.
🇻🇪 Venezuela
Arequipe / dulce de leche
Arequipe is also widely used here, alongside dulce de leche in some contexts.
🇦🇷 Argentina & 🇺🇾 Uruguay
Dulce de leche
A major part of everyday dessert culture—from toast and pancakes to alfajores and cakes.
🇧🇷 Brazil
Doce de leite
The Portuguese name literally means “sweet of milk.” Textures range from spoonable and creamy to firmer, sliceable versions.
🇨🇱 Chile
Manjar
The familiar Chilean name for the milk-caramel family, used generously in cakes, cookies and pastries.
🇵🇪 Peru
Manjar blanco / manjar
A related milk sweet used in alfajores and traditional desserts. Regional preparations can differ in ingredients and texture.
🇲🇽 Mexico
Cajeta
A close cousin traditionally made mainly with goat’s milk, which gives it a distinct flavor. It deserves to be treated as its own regional specialty, not simply renamed dulce de leche.
🇪🇨 Ecuador & 🇧🇴 Bolivia
Manjar de leche / manjar blanco
Names and recipes vary by region; some local versions are closer to classic dulce de leche, while others have their own preparation traditions.
🇨🇺 Cuba
Fanguito / cremita de leche
Both names appear in descriptions of Cuban milk-caramel sweets; usage can vary by family and source.
🇫🇷 France
Confiture de lait
Literally “milk jam,” a French relative associated especially with Normandy and Savoy.
A note about origin stories: several countries have beloved stories about who “invented” dulce de leche. The historical origin is disputed, so this site treats it as a shared culinary tradition rather than awarding one neat birthplace.
Sources & further reading. Regional names and distinctions are cross-checked against regulatory and technical sources from Colombia, Mexico, Peru and Chile. INVIMA (Colombia): arequipe o dulce de leche · Gobierno de México: cajeta · INACAL (Perú): manjarblanco · SAG (Chile): manjar o dulce de leche