Comments on How interchangable are white and brown sugars?
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How interchangable are white and brown sugars?
I recently made a peach cobbler following a recipe that called for equal parts of white sugar and brown sugar in both the fruit mix and the topping. This got me wondering about the functions of the two sugars and to what extent they are interchangable. Brown sugar has more of a flavor (from the molasses), but are their baking properties different? If I wanted to use only one type of sugar or only had one type, and used the same combined quantity, how would this affect how the dish bakes (fruit or topping or both)? Or would it only change the flavor?
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I had a banana bread recipe that called for brown sugar, but all the brown sugar I could find in the house had turned to rock. I never actually got to try the original recipe, but I got a nicely flavoured result using dried honey dates.
Brown sugar is somewhat more dense than white sugar; to make the substitution I use the full volume of white sugar, plus about five dates per cup of sugar. I mash the dates separately and cream them along with the butter and sugar in the recipe, and proceed normally from there.
As far as I've been able to figure out, added molasses tends to make cookies softer, but otherwise doesn't seem to affect baking noticeably. It just tastes different.
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