You Can Make Brown Sugar at Home Using White Sugar

Brown sugar recipe
Photo by Monika Grabkowska on Unsplash

There are quite a lot of baking recipes that require you to use brown sugar instead of regular white. It adds a distinct flavor to baked goods and desserts while also caramelizing faster compared to white sugar. But since it’s not as popular, most people realize that they don’t have any only when they’re about halfway through making a cake or some other dessert.

In this case, there are two things you can do. One is to go to the grocery store and buy some. The other is to make your own brown sugar.

Most people don’t know that you can make brown sugar at home. This is because all sugar, whether it’s white, brown, or powdered, comes from the same place.

Raw Sugar

During the production process, sugarcane plants are pressed to extract sugar-rich juice. The juice then gets purified and crystalized into the raw sugar through evaporation. The raw sugar then goes through the refining process. In this stage, the raw sugar that loses all of its impurities becomes white sugar. The one that keeps the syrupy substance known as molasses is brown sugar.

How to Make Brown Sugar

So, in order to turn your white sugar into brown sugar, you just need to take one step back in the sugar production process. Since molasses is widely used as a substance for sweetening and flavoring food, there are chances you might have some sitting around to do. Just take one cup of regular sugar and one tablespoon of molasses and mix them in a bowl with a mixer or wooden spoon. The white sugar will absorb the molasses and become brown sugar on the spot.

This technique is often used by the brown sugar producers themselves since mixing white sugar with molasses gives them more control over the ratio compared to simply leaving the raw sugar with its natural content of molasses.

Molasses Alternatives

If you don’t have molasses, you can use several substitutes that will give you similar results. This includes maple syrup and agave nectar, which are mixed in the same ratio and in the same way with sugar like molasses.