Kitchen Project #135: All About Brown Sugar

What's your favourite? ft. shortbread & meringue tests!

Apr 14, 2024

Hello,

Welcome to today’s edition of Kitchen Projects. Thank you so much for being here.

Today I’m thrilled to be celebrating a store cupboard hero: brown sugar! Whilst we transfer seasons and await the pleasures of early summer fruit, there’s no better time than to lean into the year-round flavours we have at our disposal.

Over on KP+, I’m sharing the most gorgeous brown sugar sponge recipe. It’s incredibly versatile, airy with a depth of flavour that marries perfectly with a simple cream. Click here for the recipe.

What's KP+? Well, it's the level-up version of this newsletter. By joining KP+, you will support the writing and research that goes into the newsletter (including the commissioning - and fair payment - of all the writers), join a growing community, access extra content (inc., the entire archive with 300+ recipes) and more. Subscribing is easy and only costs £6 per month or just £50 per year (equivalent to £4.10 per month). Why not give it a go? Come and join the gang!

Love,
Nicola

PSSST: SIFT is out in just a few weeks!!!

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I CAN’T BELIEVE IT BUT my debut book SIFT: The Elements of Great Baking is out in just a few weeks on the 2nd of May. It is available to pre-order now! You can see a flick through of the book in the video above - I cannot WAIT for you to see this book. Across 350 pages, I'll guide you through the fundamentals of baking and pastry through in-depth reference sections and well over 100 tried & tested recipes with stunning photography and incredible design. SIFT is the book I wish I'd had when I first started baking and I can’t wait to show you more.

Order your copy here!

Brown sugar, spice and all things nice

We are firmly in the in-between right now. The blue skies and tossing aside of winter coats tell me one thing, but biting winds and trees still without leaves tell a different story. Fruit is equally confused; it's far too early even to imagine inviting a strawberry or peach into the kitchen, but the winter citrus is past its best. We can still enjoy the tail end of rhubarb, but for the most part, we’re used to the giddy pinkness. Though Indian mangoes, at £4 a piece (!), have begun to appear in the more lucrative grocers in my area, I know I mustn’t jump the gun - the best is still to come. So what to do?

Looking back at the recipes I’ve shared in April over the last few years, there are a few common themes. Last year, I published a wonderful piece from Camilla Wynne about preserving, a ‘field guide’ to get you ready for the incoming gluts - it’s the written equivalent of a training montage.

There have also been editions on custard, cookies, and breads (ft. wild garlic, of course, because otherwise I’d almost certainly be fired from writing about food by a higher power. I don’t make the rules!), all of which have one major thing in common: They don’t rely on any fresh ingredient at its peak.

So, for today’s edition, a celebration of April and its in-between-ness, I wanted to look into the baker’s store cupboard for inspiration: Let’s talk about sugar. In particular, brown sugar. It’s one of those component ingredients, essential structure builders of all our bakes, that can also be considered and celebrated as the main flavour profile of a recipe. Much like brown butter or olive oil - and oppositely to, let say, an egg yolk, I’d be thrilled to tout a brown sugar cake (and do, for KP+!).

I don’t consider sugar a seasoning—its role extends far beyond that of a spice or a handful of nuts strewn through a batter before cooking—but there’s no denying that its flavour profiles make a huge difference to our recipes. Adjusting the sugars is one of the simplest and most effective ways of altering a recipe and putting your own stamp on it. But can you swap sugars 1:1? It’s a question I’ve been asked a lot.

Today, we’ll examine two simple recipes, shortbread biscuits and airy sponge cake, to see how the sugar we use can impact our final recipes. Shall we get into it?

An overview of sugar - what, where and how

Understanding the history, make-up, and background of the key ingredients we’re using is important for improving our approach to developing recipes.

As you go down the baking rabbit hole, you’ll often see a lot of sugars being used in all their different forms. But what actually *is* sugar? When baking, we spend most of our time hanging out with sucrose - your classic white sugar - or sucrose + molasses (light brown or dark brown sugar), so it seems a good place to start.

Sugar comes in many forms, but the two key forms are refined and unrefined.

Refined sugar is sucrose extracted from one of two sources: sugar beet or sugar cane. Sugar beet is grown in cooler climates, like the UK, whilst sugarcane is grown in tropical climates, like Brazil. Whilst there are some differences in the processing of the cane vs. the beet, it’s around about the same - the cane and beet are crushed or sliced, and then the juice is boiled and processed to separate the molasses (more on that in a second) from the pure sucrose - well, 99.95%! Pretty close. These two are fully interchangeable since pure sucrose is extracted.

It is then either used as pure white sugar or goes through another process to become other products—molasses is added back in to make light and dark brown sugar. This changes the colour, texture, and flavour of the sugar, making it akin to wet sand.

Molasses is where the cane and beet differ—beet molasses is not very sweet and is used for animal feed, whilst cane molasses is the sweet syrupy stuff we’re used to enjoying.

Unrefined sugar, however, is rarely derived from beets (the molasses isn’t quite as sweet) and mainly comes from sugar cane. Muscovado, for example, is a product of cane sugar. It is considered unrefined because the molasses and sucrose are extracted together rather than added in later like most light brown/dark brown sugar products.

Demerara is also an unrefined sugar derived from cane sugar. As the sucrose syrup boils down and reduces, small crystals are left, which give us those crunchy crystals. Panela sugar is an unrefined sugar made from evaporated sugar cane juice. It retains more natural molasses and minerals, giving it an ultra-rich, caramel-like flavour. If you can get your hands on it, I’ve no doubt you’ll fall in love.

So, what about liquid sugars?

To get started, we need to understand what sugar is. As I mentioned earlier, white sugar is pure sucrose (50% fructose and 50% glucose). Let’s consider one of the most famous liquid sugars, honey, as an example.

Honey, however, has an uneven mixture of fructose (40%) and glucose (30%), with the rest being made up of water, pollen, and other impurities. This variable 30% gives honey its unique, environmentally influenced flavour—white sugar, no matter where it comes from in the world, is always going to taste like white sugar.

Honey happens to be an inverted sugar. Inverted sugar is one of those things you don’t *HAVE* to know about it, but the fancier pastry books you buy, the more often you’ll see it mentioned. It can be made by adding sucrose to liquid and ‘breaking’ the bond with an acid - basically, inverted sugar just means that the glucose and the fructose molecules have been ‘separated’ and so are both available to create bonds. This has some benefits, from delaying water movement to improved sweetness.

So, if you do come across a recipe that asks for inverted sugar, you can swap in honey, but beware that honey comes with some strings - herbaceous, flavourful and spiced strings as well as impurities that may bubble or react unexpectedly - whilst inverted sugars are purely sweet. Other liquid sugars, like molasses, golden syrup and treacle, are derived from the cane and beet sugar process, whilst some are derived from palm (jaggery syrup) corn (corn syrup), barley (malt syrup) or tree sap (maple and birch syrup).

Are granular and liquid sugars interchangeable?

In a word, yes. Go forth and conquer! But prepare yourself for some slightly different results, including baking time, colour, texture (softer! moister!), and, of course, flavour (deeper, weirder, more dimensional!). Changing the sugar in your recipe is one of the fastest ways to yield new, interesting flavour results with a pretty effortless tweak. I mixed up batches of shortbread to investigate this further.

Shortbread is one of the simplest ways to compare and contrast the flavour and role of sugar. With just three ingredients and a simple ratio of 1:2:3, we can easily track sugar's varying behaviours and properties.

[optimize output image] — how shortbread bakes!

The Results

I hope you can use this guide to mix and match your own dream shortbread - perhaps a combination of icing sugar for stability but unrefined sugar for flavour, etc. I’ve shared my basic shortbread formulation below! I was quite surprised by the liquid sugar. To be honest, I really thought it would spread more. My only guess is that the flour absorbed the excess liquid and formed gluten during the fridge rest, resulting in a firmer and more shapely biscuit.

A note on spread—it should be noted that the spread is likely due to different amounts of air whipped into the butter. Though I tried to make each of these tests using the exact same method, it’s possible that the variation in spread in two very similar sugars (light brown vs. dark brown) is due to my whipping a different amount of air into each batch. This leads me nicely to the next topic…

What about aeration?

It’s also worth considering that granular sugar and butter make the base of most cakes because they form air pockets during the creaming process. Liquid sugar, thanks to its water content, does get in the way of these air pockets forming. So, when swapping granular for liquids, expect a less airy cake, but know you’re getting flavour in return.

However, there are two sides to every coin. Liquid sugars, or sugars with more moisture, like brown sugar, will give you improved aeration in foams like meringues. Just look at the difference between the brown sugar and white sugar meringues. This is 110g egg whites (from the same batch of eggs!) with 90g of sugar, whisked on high speed for 1 minute, then lower speed for 4 minutes:

The brown sugar meringue was so incredibly floofy and out of this world shiny. Piling it into the same bowl, you can immediately see how much more voluminous the brown sugar meringue is. I also piped it into matching jugs, but remember that I probably squished out a decent amount of air when transferring. Still, the brown sugar dominates:

So why is this? My initial thought was the additional water and moisture in the brown sugar. And while I think this is the main culprit, Sophia Sallas-Brookwell made an interesting point in my DMs (and encouraged this investigation, thank you!) - what about acid?

I’ve covered both of these topics previously in the Pavlova 101 edition. First, let’s talk about moisture - adding liquid to your egg whites makes for a gloriously voluminous mixture, but it’s not that useful when baking meringue. The additional water makes the crust of a pavlova very thin and fragile and extremely prone to cracks in my experience - it also has an almost pearlescent look, and there is a lot of separation between the centre and the crust. Any “free water” has a major impact on the final meringue, so whilst I wouldn’t recommend it for crisp meringues, it’s a touch for airy cakes.

Now, acids: To explain this best, I look to my hero Harold McGee, author of ‘On Food and Cooking’. McGee has done a huge amount of research about the effect of copper bowls on egg whites - according to McGee, during the aeration process of egg whites, several types of bonds are formed - the bond between the proteins (what we hear about a lot) but also bonds between sulfur groups. These sulfur bonds are unstable, i.e. prone to breaking down, so by whipping egg whites in a copper bowl (or, indeed, adding an acid), you are interfering with these awkward sulfur compounds and thus making them more stable.

I use this to great effect in my brown sugar sponge, your new favourite airy sponge that is SO incredibly reliable; you’ll wonder how you lived without it:

Brown Sugar Sponge Recipe!

How acidic is brown sugar, anyway?

One thing that some recipe developers will warn you about is the acidity of different sugars. This is often introduced as a topic to encourage you to keep your wits about you when you are balancing recipes, especially ones with raising agents present. As you know, recipes that contain chemical-raising agents can be affected by the presence of acid. Some recipes may point to the brown sugar in a formulation as the acid available to react with baking soda.

A weak acid from my brown sugar solution

White caster sugar has a neutral pH, and molasses is acidic, which points to brown sugar having a lowered pH. To observe this, I dissolved light brown and dark brown sugar into water, and the pH was slightly lowered, though not extremely. To see how this ingredient fared as an acidic counterpart for bicarbonate of soda, I mixed a teaspoon into water and then continuously added dark brown sugar until it reacted. It does react, but not explosively - it was more of a thick froth than a burst of carbon dioxide-fueled life. It’s worth considering, then, that not only does the amount of bicarbonate of soda we use in a recipe matter, but the strength of the acid. Bicarb reacting with brown sugar might make a cookie puffy, but it is unlikely to raise a cake alone.

The subtle bubbling and foaming of brown sugar bicarb

It’s worth mentioning here that bicarbonate of soda doesn’t actually need an acid to react and produce CO2—it can produce it all on its own if there’s enough heat and moisture. Though this article suggests 122f/50c as a baseline (no pun intended) for the reaction, I found it wasn’t until 90c + that I got a significant reaction.

What about clumps?

We’ve all been there. We’ve reached for the dark or light brown sugar and instead of pleasant wet sand, you’re greeted with a brick. I’m always amazed at the sheer strength and density of a dried-out block of brown sugar - I actually dented my countertop with it once when trying to break it into pieces out of sheer frustration. There are plenty of remedies, though: It can be microwaved with a damp cloth or left overnight under a damp tea towel to encourage it to rehydrate. You can also massage a little water into it or even grate it! You could also blitz it to fine grain in a food processor. However, there are times - especially with dark brown sugar - when small clumps remain even after you’ve done your best to remedy them.

You have two options - remove them one by one (tedious) or embrace them. Certainly, with my brown sugar sponge, I’ve come to love tiny little dark brown molasses-y bombs. Like biting down into a salt crystal, it’s a little flavour explosion.

Any sugar shortbread

This is a very basic formulation for shortbread. Simply 1:2:3, sugar, butter, and flour, and use it as a jumping-off point for biscuits. I personally love a variation with a little semolina (see the recipe here for the ratio) for an improved crumble and texture. Still, this classic ratio remains a classic for a reason.

Makes about 20 biscuits - half you can leave plain, half you can glaze (or do as many as you like!)

75g sugar of choice
150g butter
225g plain flour
1.5g flaky salt, about 1/3 - 1/2 tsp

Method

Cream butter with sugar of choice. You want it to be ‘light’ but not ultra fluffy or white - a minute should do it.
Mix flour and salt together
Paddle/stir the flour mixture into the butter mixture
Roll into a 4-5cm wide log and wrap well. To get a perfect log, squish and press the dough together on the table, kneading slightly to reduce any air bubbles or potential gaps. Keep squishing and pressing, rolling as you go, then form into the shape you want, like this:
Chill in the freezer/fridge so you can cut it neatly. Around 2 hours in the fridge or 30-40 minutes in the freezer. You can also store it well-wrapped in the freezer for 30 days or the fridge for 3 days
Pre-heat oven to 160c fan
Slice into 1cm rounds, around 20g per shortbread. If there are still air gaps in the rounds, you can squish it closed.