#toasted sugar

[fullcravings]

Toasted Sugar and Dalgona Coffee Pots de Creme

[daily-deliciousness]

Browned butter and toasted sugar cake

[foodffs]

toasted sugar vanilla bean macarons with caramelised white chocolate german buttercream

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Is this how you roll?

[what-marsha-eats]

Upside-Down Blueberry Muffin Recipe

Classic blueberry muffins are perfect for breakfast on the go, but for a lazy breakfast or brunch, this upside down format presents the oppo

[jazzeria]

I made toasted sugar, following this guide on Serious Eats. I ran into some issues.

First, 4 lbs of sugar did not fit in my 9x13 inch glass pan. More to the point, it just fit but without any room to stir. So I'd change the sugar amount to: "as much can fit in your pan, with at least 1/2 inch room for stirring". Not wanting to put the sugar back in the bag, I opted for a larger pan.

Second, my oven is "eco-friendly", which I think means, "it gets colder than most ovens do before turning the element back on to reach the set temperature." So after 1 hour at 300F, there was no discernible change. I had to bake about 4 hours to get the level of toastiness shown. I even turned up my oven to 325F, which actually worked much better for me. (To be fair: I do not own an oven thermometer; maybe my oven actually runs cold.)

Issues aside, the finished product is delicious. Subtly toasty, but noticeable. I think it would be, as the author describes, perfect in a vanilla buttercream frosting.

Four pounds is not a small amount of sugar to have without a plan (I did not have a plan), so I've been stirring it into my tea, baking with it, and generally using it instead of white sugar.

[ritzymomblog]

(via Toasted Sugar and Coconut Creme Banana Muffins)

[snarp]

Bad photos of caramel-sugar experiment. The little jar’s the chunks that were left when I finished sifting (minus like 2-3 tablespoons that I ate).

The consistency of the sifted sugar is basically like unusually-clumpy white sugar, which is what it started out as - the bottom half of the bag was a brick. The house was too humid for all the moisture to steam out of there, plus I had to leave it closed up in the microwave overnight to keep Bu away.

[snarp]

@bloodthreadsaltglassandtears​:

I'll bite -- why the sugar?

Making this. Science, practiced in its truest and best form, a few years back discovered an entirely new goddamn fact about caramel. Sucrose does not actually “melt” - food scientists have apparently been fruitlessly fighting each other over the “real” melting point for decades, because there isn’t one - and caramelization is a different process, which you can make happen without liquefying the sugar if you apply low, even, dry heat over a period of several hours.

(...I guess this isn’t as stupid as it sounds given that widespread use of refined sugar is pretty new historically, and actually using the technique in recipes isn’t entirely new? It’s still stupid. What the hell is even going on with food science research.)

@maverick-ornithography:

how did the caramelization turn out? i've been itching to try it but i worry i'm going to get distracted and end up with liquid caramel filling a baking tray

I did in fact kinda do that, but fortunately only the bottom corners turned liquid. And you can do it for just one hour and get something that’s still interestingly caramel-tasting-ish! It just still looks mostly like white sugar.

Some things that the recipe doesn’t really emphasize enough:

* The change within the first two hours is really, really not obvious visually - you’ll think you have the heat on too low.

I turned it up after an hour because I thought it wasn’t working, and it still looked white to me until I took it out to stir at the 1.5-hour mark. Then I noticed that it was darker than the jar of white sugar I had sitting on the counter, and that the corners had gone syrupy.

* Probably don’t start with a full 4-pound bag like they recommend if you want it really-obviously brown. It took like five hours for me to get there.

* When you’re done, get it out of the glass pan and into a metal one or a bowl or something as quickly as you can without hurting yourself. If you leave it in there to cool it’ll start fusing to the bottom.

* Don’t try to sift it until it’s completely cool all the way through (which takes hours). Any part that’s still even slightly warm is still caramelizing and so still releasing water, so the clumps will just reform. I ended up sifting it twice.