Search Results for: molasses

On Sugar Pies

Most people think sugar pies like treacle tart and shoofly pie are modern recipes, ultra-indulgences of the sweet tooth born in the industrial age. In fact they’re much older than that. Much. Sugar and molasses pies go back to the earliest days of sugar making in the Middle East. When sugar eventually spread to Europe, Europeans were only too happy to join the sugar pie party, and in time brought their ultra-sweet pastries to the New World.

Looking especially at the treacle tart recipe below you can see echoes of Renaissance cooking: far-eastern spice and a bread crumb binder/thickener. That general approach carries over to shoo-fly pie, though the Germans changed the crumbs to a streusel topping which works just the same or even a little better. Interestingly, it’s thought

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Treacle Tart Recipe

While we’re making candy in a crust, I think a little treacle tart is in order as well, don’t you? There are a lot of contemporary recipes that add things like cream and eggs, but as with the shoo-fly pie recipe below, I like the more traditional and/rustic version. You’ll need:

1 recipe savory tart crust
16 ounces (1 1/3 cups) golden syrup or light molasses
3 ounces (1 cup) fresh bread crumbs or (1/2 cup) rolled oats
zest of 1 lemon zest
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1/4 teaspoon ground ginger

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Refiner’s (a.k.a. “Golden”) Syrup

Refiner’s syrup (also called “golden syrup”) is made, as the name implies, at a sugar refinery, not at the sugar mill which is where molasses is produced. It’s a by product of the making of white sugar, the final “molasses” that’s produced when white sugar is centrifuged. It contains mainly sucrose and water when it’s first spun out, but is treated with acid (or sometimes the enzyme invertase) to create a proportion of invert sugar. For more on sugar refining, see my (now integrated) primer on sugar making.

Refiner’s syrup can make a fine alternative to either molasses or corn syrup depending on the application, though since it tastes every bit as sweet as table sugar you need to be careful about overloading your recipe with sweetness.

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High Fructose Corn Syrup

We hear a lot about the evils of high fructose corn syrup (ominously initialized HFCS) these days. It’s the packaged food industry’s most pervasive sweetner, found in everything from Coke to ketchup. Anything that broadly used simply must be evil — an articifially created, chemically modified, fatally addictive hypno-crack. A team effort by the National Corn Growers Association, Columbian drug lords, Dow Chemical, Karl Rove and Satan.

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Corn Syrup

Since 1811, the year Gottlieb Kirchhoff combined sulfuric acid with potato starch and created syrup, scientists have been aware that starches are rich sources of sugar. The problem for the next hundred years or so was how to produce it on a mass scale. In time it was discovered that plant enzymes (non-living organic molecules that perform specific tasks for living organisms) could do the job just as effectively, breaking down (hydrolyzing) long-chain starches into their sweet-tasting pieces.

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Jaggery Sugar

If refined — even minimally processed — sugars aren’t your thing, then a jaggery sugar may be right up your alley. Jaggery is the closest you can get to sugar as it was done thousands of years ago. It’s made the truly old-fashioned way: by boiling cane juice in broad pans until most of the water has evaporated, then allowing the syrup to cool and crystallize into a thick slurry of crystals. At that point it’s poured into a conical mold with a hole at the bottom so the molasses can run out. A week or so later you have…this!

Here it’s important to note that jaggery can be made from either cane or date palm sugar. This, I was very surprised to learn this morning, is palm sugar. I jimmied a piece off the side with a knife and sure enough it tasted like dates. I also thought the burlap sack was a nice touch. Jaggery sugars are made and sold all over southern and south eastern Asia. They can be light or dark and have a variety of flavors, from very mild to quite strong indeed.

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Muscovado Sugar

Muscovado sugar is another so-called “raw” sugar that’s made not at a refinery but the original sugar mill. As opposed to lighter “turbinado” and Demerara sugar, muscovado has quite small crystals. It’s a product of later crystallizations — the second or even the third — which means the molasses that coats it is much thicker and darker. It’s also usually air-dried instead of being spun in a centrifuge.

In many ways muscovado is similar to a refinery brown sugar (though the muscovado pictured above isn’t especially dark as these sugars go). It’s soft and strong tasting with all the deep caramel, mineral and acetic acid vinegar-like notes. However like other raw sugars it retains some of the brighter vegetable or grass-like flavors that refinery brown sugars don’t have. It can be used in any application that calls for brown sugar.

Oh, and the name comes from an arcane Spanish word meaning “separated out” or “reduced” (makes sense when you consider how crystal sugar is made). Muscovado also goes by the name of “Barbados” sugar (where a similar product was originally made) and also “moist” or “molasses” sugar.

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Turbinado Sugar

Turbinado is a “raw” large-crystal sugar, which is to say it’s made and packed at a sugar mill close to the point of harvest, not at a refinery. It’s a product of the first crystallization that occurs at at mill. Like all crystal sugars it’s spun in a centrifuge to (mostly) rid it of molasses, but it’s the only sugar that I’m aware of that actually takes its name from the machinery (a centrifuge is also called a “turbine”). The processing removes nearly all of the original molasses (turbinado sugar is 98-99% sucrose) but it still has a more interesting flavor than white sugar since that original molasses often contains fresh grassy aromas and flavors from the cane plant. Because turbindo sugar has hints molasses flavor but is still mostly sucrose, it’s frequently used to top crème brûlée where it forms a flavorful — yet still quire hard — crust.

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Brown Sugar (Dark)

“Dark” brown sugars are similar to light brown sugars in that they are refinery sugars, almost always produced by “painting”, i.e. the application of a very dark molasses. Dark brown sugar can contain as little as 85% sucrose. Up to 5% of it can be plant matter and long-chain sugars, and up to 2% various minerals and salts (the rest being water, glucose and fructose). That being the case, it has a similar flavor profile as light brown sugar, except that those flavors are stronger and are supplemented by bitter and even licorice notes. Its higher acetic acid content can make is almost tangy and/or vinegar-y tasting.

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