Ingredient: Dark brown soft sugar
Category: Sugars & Syrups
Season: All
This sugar has a moist, fine-grained texture and fudgy, dark-brown flavour.
This sugar is great for gingerbread, ginger biscuits and flapjacks, pickles and chutneys.
Brown sugar is a sucrose sugar product with a distinctive brown color due to the presence of molasses. It is either an unrefined or partially refined soft sugar consisting of sugar crystals with some residual molasses content or produced by the addition of molasses to refined white sugar.
Brown sugar contains from 3.5% molasses (light brown sugar) to 6.5% molasses (dark brown sugar).
The product is naturally moist from the hygroscopic nature of the molasses and is often labelled as "soft." The product may undergo processing to give a product that flows better for industrial handling. The addition of dyes and/or other chemicals may be permitted in some areas or for industrial products.
Particle size is variable but generally less than granulated white sugar.
Products for industrial use (e.g. the industrial production of cakes) may be based on caster sugar which has crystals of approximately 0.35 mm.
Manufacture
Many brown sugar producers produce brown sugar by adding cane molasses to completely refined white sugar crystals in order to more carefully control the ratio of molasses to sugar crystals and to reduce manufacturing costs.
This also allows the production of brown sugars based predominantly on sugar obtained from beet.
Brown sugar prepared in this manner is often much coarser than its unrefined equivalent and its molasses may be easily separated from the crystals by simple washing to reveal the underlying white sugar crystals; with unrefined brown there is inclusion of molasses within the crystal which will appear off-white if washed. This is mainly done for inventory control and convenience.
The molasses usually used is that obtained from sugar cane, because the flavour is generally preferred over beet sugar molasses. Although in some areas, especially in the Netherlands, sugar beet molasses is used.
The white sugar used can be from either beet or cane as odour and color differences will be covered by the molasses.
Brown sugar can be made at home by mixing white granulated sugar with molasses, using one tablespoon of molasses for every cup of white sugar (one-sixteenth or 6.25% of the total volume).
Thorough blending will yield dark brown sugar; for light brown sugar, between one and two teaspoons of molasses per cup should be used instead.
It is, simpler to substitute molasses for an equal portion of white sugar while cooking, without mixing them separately.
When a recipe calls for "brown sugar" it is usually referring to dark brown sugar, light brown sugar should only be used when specified.
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