Is brown sugar just white sugar with something else added ?,
kinda! Is brown sugar more natural than white sugar ?, kinda !
Brown sugar is a sucrose product with a distinctive brown color
due to the presence of molasses. There are three ways of
manufacturing brown sugar.
1. Brown sugar made from partially refined soft sugar consisting
of sugar crystals with some residual of molasses. Brown sugar
crystals are usually smaller than white sugar crystals and have a
higher moist content because of the molasses. Brown sugar
contains from 3.5% molasses (light brown sugar) to 6.6%
molasses (dark brown sugar).
2. Brown sugar is manufactured by adding molasses to refined
white sugar. Many sugar producers produce brown sugar by
adding sugar cane molasses. This practice is done for inventory
control and convenience
3. Natural brown sugar is the name given to raw sugar, which is
brown sugar produced from the first crystallisation of cane. This
sugar is popular with people that are into organic foods. Raw
sugar may be used in cooking and baking. It will give you a
sightly different taste, but not noticed by most people. Raw sugar
is more expensive than processed white sugar or brown sugar.
If you do not have brown sugar, you can make your own.
Add one Tbsp. of molasses to 1 cup of white sugar, blend well,
this will give you dark brown sugar. You can also add them
separately to the recipe. I like the flavor of the freshly made
brown sugar, you can taste a richer flavor in your finished
product. I thought that this story was very interesting. In the late
1800’s the newly consolidated white sugar industry, which did
not have control over brown sugar production, mounted a smear
campaign against brown sugar. They reproduced microscopic
photographs of harmless but repulsive-looking microbes living in
brown sugar. The effort was so successful that by 1900, a best
selling cookbook warned that brown sugar was of inferior quality
and was susceptible ti infestation by “a minute bug”
www. Wikipedia.org