When in the supermarket, have you ever been puzzled about the raw sugar in food labels? If you’d like to know what exactly raw sugar is, I’ve got you .
It’s pretty common to see “sprinkle with raw sugar” at the end of a recipe for baked goods like scones or muffins or quick bread.
What Is Raw Sugar?
Raw sugar—which is technically a processed food—gets its name from a result of the processing step. As sugarcane is refined, molasses is produced as a byproduct. While the molasses is removed during the creation of granulated sugar, some of it is left in raw sugar. This gives the sugar its golden-brown color and caramel-y flavor.
Often referred to on packages as turbinado or Demerara sugar (which you see more often in the UK), raw sugar is always a minimally refined cane sugar. While Turbinado and Demerara sugars sometimes differ in color and granule size, they’re ultimately interchangeable in recipes.
Raw sugar is any type of cane sugar refined through one cycle of crystallization and centrifugation, retaining trace amounts of the original cane molasses. They generally contain less than 2% molasses and 97 to 99% sucrose. On the other hand, refined cane sugars go through a series of crystallization and centrifugation cycles, to result in an astonishingly pure sucrose! 99.95 percent!
The most widely available raw sugar in stores is labeled simply as organic sugar. It is a made from organic sugarcane and processed according USDA’s Organic Standards. It has medium size crystals, blond color and delicate molasses flavor. Not all organic cane sugars are raw, some are unrefined such as eSutras Jaggery. Learn more in another blog post titled What Is Organic Sugar?
Raw sugars are produced in several crystal sizes and molasses content. Medium-size crystals typically have blond color. Coarse Crystals have pale brown to brown color, do not readily dissolve, and have a crunchy texture. Raw sugars generally have a hint of molasses flavor and are slightly more moist than white sugars, but dry enough to be free-flowing. Raw sugar cubes and liquid raw sugar are also available.
Takeaway
Raw sugar does not mean an unrefined, unprocessed, or ‘in its natural state’ sugar.
Raw sugars actually go through a great deal of processing but much less than white sugar.
Raw sugars (97 to 99% sucrose) are slightly less refined than table sugar (99,9% sucrose).
Often promoted as healthier than refined sugars because they are less processed and have a tiny amount of molasses, the truth is they do not have more nutritive value than refined sugar.
Choose raw sugars for reasons such as their delicate molasses flavor or for your satisfaction, but not based on their nutritional value, as they are not much different than table sugar.
How raw sugar is used?
Raw sugar can technically be used as a substitute for granulated sugar in most recipes, but it might affect the overall texture of the bake. Cook’s Illustrated tested swapping in raw sugar for granulated in a number of recipes, and the results were mixed.
While they said the raw sugar altered the flavor of the baked goods to be a bit more molasses-forward, it wasn’t a problem. And while the layer cakes the team tested “had a moist and uniform crumb and were fluffier than the cakes made with granulated sugar,” the muffins were “denser and slightly squatter and tougher than those made with granulated sugar.”
The team came to the conclusion that raw sugar’s large granules were the culprit of the muffins’ disappointing texture, as they didn’t dissolve as quickly as smaller granulated sugar granules. The quickest fix is to simply grind raw sugar in a clean spice grinder or food processor until it’s roughly the same texture as granulated.
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