Homemade Brown Sugar

Homemade Brown Sugar

I love baking and cooking with a fresh package of brown sugar. It smells so good.

I also love packing it tightly into a measuring cup when I use it in a recipe.

The satisfaction I get when it flips out, perfectly molded, like sand for a sand castle always makes me smile.

Brown sugar is an integral part of baking and cooking. Most home cooks keep an ample amount of both dark and light brown sugar. I am sure we have all been in the situation where we go into the pantry to get our sugar we find it is hard as cement.

We slam it against the counter. Hit with a meat tenderizer. I have even tried an electric knife in desperation. It is just too stubborn to soften up.

With the need to stay at home and the short time dark or light brown sugar stays on the shelf we need a new way of thinking.

So we make our own. It is easy if you have these two ingredients in the pantry. White sugar and molasses.

Most images in my Tip Friday Series use free stock photos. This article is part of the Tips That Help in the Kitchen Series, Tip Friday.

How Brown Sugar Is Made

Unrefined or partially refined brown sugar is sugar that still contains some molasses from the original sugar refining process. It can be labeled factory, raw, natural, turbinado, demerara, and muscavado, among other names, depending on origin and the refining process.

Refined brown sugar is made by adding molasses back to refined white sugar. This is the commercial brown sugar that is soft and moist and what is commonly thought of as brown sugar, so we’ll focus in on this type and how it’s used.

These sugars may not be as soft and moist as more refined brown sugars.

Recipes will sometimes specify dark brown or light brown sugar. What is the difference? It’s simply the amount of molasses in it:

Dark brown sugar contains about 6.5% molasses. Light brown sugar contains about 3.5% molasses.

How Moisture Affects the Texture of Refined Brown Sugar

We have all opened a canister with brown sugar is hard as cement. Here is why. Brown sugar is naturally moist and soft because of the thin film of molasses that covers each sugar crystal. If the moisture in the molasses evaporates, however, the sugar hardens into one mass, so it should always be sealed in an airtight container to prevent moisture loss. See my post 3 Ways To Keep Brown Sugar Soft.

The nice thing is that molasses also readily absorbs moisture. So if your brown sugar has hardened, you can seal it with bread or an apple so the molasses can steal and suck up its moisture to soften the brown sugar again!

Cooking and Baking with Brown Sugar

Molasses is the key flavor in brown sugar, so dark brown sugar has a richer, more caramel flavor than light brown. If your recipe does not specify which kind of brown sugar to use, you can probably use whatever you have on hand. Choose the one you think is better suited to the recipe. Dark Brown has deeper flavor. If you don’t want the molasses to overpower the other flavors in the recipe, go with light.

Don’t ever be caught with hard brown sugar again. Now you never have to worry about being without either.