I'm thankful that we at least have some form of brown sugar available to us here in China. The thought of having to bring molasses (or buy the high priced stuff at the import stores) to then make my own brown sugar isn't a fun one. But that doesn't change the fact that the locally available brown sugar or 红糖 can be far from desirable for baking. Even if you like using dark brown sugar--its REALLY dark, it has lots of hard clumps, and don't even get me started on when one might accidentally buy the ginger brown sugar thinking its a little lighter brown and would be better! Please tell me others have done that! So, here are are few things I've done to make the best of local brown sugar in China.
1. Do your best to weed through it and pull out all the hard clumps. Its NO fun to get one of those in your cookie thinking its a chocolate chip!
2. SAVE the hard clumps! Once you have enough, put them in a skillet with a tiny bit of water over medium heat. Melt them down and then you have a form of molasses that you can throw into gingerbread or cookies or BBQ sauce! I suggest using it immediately after you melt it down.
3. Tone the brown sugar down a bit for baking. If you don't want such a dark sugar with a strong flavor in your cookies or other baked goods, you can use half the amount called for. I usually try to find a bag of white granulated sugar that is a little on the "moist" side to use to make up the difference. Does that make sense? A lot of the white sugars available have the consistency and texture more of brown sugar so they are a good one to use if you want to put half brown/half white for the amount of brown sugar called for in the recipe. Then just use whatever granulated white sugar you normally buy for the granulated sugar called for.
4. Look for the good Taikoo (太古) brand brown sugar! Taikoo (originally out of Hong Kong I think) is making some good light brown sugar. It doesn't even have hard clumps! Taikoo has some available widely in stores, but its the same as all the others. However, they have a harder to find one as well. Here in Chengdu its about Y30 for a 1kg bag available at Metro. I don't feel like that's really all that bad for a high quality brown sugar. Especially as expensive as sugar is in general in China. If you don't have a Metro, consider buying it on Taobao (seems its actually labeled as 金黄 not 红). And if you're not aware, you can also find a good icing sugar in this brand as well! The 1kg orange label bags are also available at Metro.
I hope this is helpful! Please share other ideas you may have!
I need to take the effort to fish out the clumps (I do take out the big ones, but not the little--there seem to be so many!), but to remind myself not to use the full amount of just Chinese brown sugar, I mix a bag of wet white sugar in with it and just shake up the jar. Voila! "Brown sugar." :)
ReplyDeleteI buy the ginger stuff all the time but I suppose for most my uses ginger is in the recipe anyway so I like it. Thanks for the tips! I love your site!
ReplyDeleteHere in 东北 there are a lot of Korean stores that carry brown sugar similar to the kind we use in the States. The Chinese 红糖 is muscovado sugar . Here is a link with more info about it:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.thekitchn.com/ingredient-spotlight-dark-brow-115399
Some friends of mine just found a brand called 佳一粒 which makes brown sugar in a clear bag with a pretty rosy maroon colored band around the bottom and small label on top. The bag says Pure Brown Sugar. Very fine grain, no hard clumps, very light colored, and tastes so much like what we use in America for light brown sugar. I can put a picture on FB if you want. It's really so good!
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