Dulce de leche?

So, I thought I would try to make vegan dulce de leche. Maybe I did, maybe I didn't, but I ended up making something delicious and learning some things about the Maillard reaction.

I used a recipe from this thread (but with soy milk powder) to make some homemade sweetened condensed milk, then put it in a jar in the pressure cooker for 30 minutes, ala this recipe. And the result, after 30 minutes pressure cooking and a natural cool down? It hadn't changed colour at all.

I remembered that when I caramelized vegan white chocolate in the pressure cooker, it took about twice as long as regular white chocolate. So I stuck the jar back in the pressure cooker for an hour, again letting it cool down naturally. Finally, some results!

Tasty stuff! But after doing some reading, I think it might be more accurate to call it caramelized sweetened condensed milk. The thing is that true dulce de leche involves the Maillard reaction -- a reaction between proteins and sugars. But only certain sugars ('reducing sugars') work -- and regular old table sugar (sucrose), like I used in my sweetened condensed milk, isn't one of the ones that takes part in this reaction. I think in real dulce de leche, it's the sugar in the milk (lactose) that takes part in the Maillard reaction. Apparently glucose is a reducing sugar, so I might try this again with glucose some time.