Is brown sugar a healthier alternative?
For as long as I can remember people have considered BROWN color as a synonym for being healthier, for example – brown rice, brown bread, brown mushrooms, brown or yellow onions, and last but not least brown sugar. Brown rice, yes. Bread can be a different game because the amount of whole wheat flour can be increased to increase the fiber content and to some extent nutritional value (it’s not as much as we think it is, we’ll have to eat at least 40-50 slices to get recommended daily dose!), also we can’t exclude gluten allergic people, like me, but considering brown bread to be healthier is just baloney (without seeing the back of the pack*) and the other cases are difficult or maybe impossible to explain from my point of view.
First, let’s see how brown sugar is made. Commercially, brown sugar is made by adding molasses to refined white sugar crystals to more carefully control the ratio of molasses to sugar crystals and to reduce manufacturing costs, when washed under water revealing the underlying white sugar crystals. Brown sugar prepared in this manner is more bristly than unrefined one, wherein the sugar is unrefined brown sugar. Now, unrefined brown sugar is a little trickier because controlling the concentration of molasses in this process is quite difficult. What is molasses anyways? It’s a byproduct of sugar production, when boiled and crystallized down sugarcane or sugar beet juice is centrifuged the remainder is molasses (I think it’s self-explanatory why it is brown-black). So unrefined brown sugar is boiled down a little lesser and centrifuged to a lower extent so that the resulting sugar has that “brown-healthy” hue. Sugarcane molasses is generally used instead of beet sugar because of its high appreciation of taste (a statistical analysis).
How is it healthier then? As it is widely regarded, molasses makes it “less harmful”, because it contains minerals and vitamins. These play words. I agree that a minute amount of helpful compounds are present but again if we go deep, we would need to eat a lot of sugar to fulfill our daily dietary requirements, and eating that much sugar will render our intention of “Eating Healthy” moot. Click here to read another article about it. It’s almost the same case as “Why are sea salts healthier than normal salt?”
If we see it from a flavor point of view, obviously we can taste a huge difference between the two, that’s why cookies made with brown sugar have a higher range of complexity of flavor and taste molecules. Now if we look at the bigger picture we realize that we need lesser flavor molecules for us to sense a difference in taste but it’s not the same case when it comes to health perspective. So the bottom line is that we need to get rid of the “today is yesterday” mentality and base our knowledge on facts.
For my chef readers, here comes a pro tip: What to do when brown sugar clumps up to form crystals? Most cookbooks will tell you that it happens because of the removal or loss of moisture from it, which is completely true because it is almost always impossible to close the packet after opening it perfectly. So we need air-tight (or more appropriately vapor-tight) jars to store our brown sugar. Now, those same cookbooks will tell you to put the sugar in an oven to loosen it up, as if somehow the oven restores moisture. Of course, it doesn’t, but what it does is that it loosens up the dried molasses a bit, but temporarily. Now, if you want to get rid of this problem for a longer time, try keeping it with a damp towel or slice of bread or something moist that would help it regain moisture (it’s a quite slow process, but long-lasting).
