30.1 Sugars and syrups

What sugar does in a bake

Only two ingredients see more use in a bakeshop than sugar. Sweetness is only one of its jobs.

• It browns. Heat on sugar alone gives caramelization: the sugar melts, darkens and takes on new flavors. When sugar meets protein in strong heat, the Maillard reaction browns the food instead. Both give crusts their color and much of their flavor, in bread, cookies and cakes alike.
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• It tenderizes. No ingredient does more to keep a baked good tender. Sugar holds back the forming of gluten, the stretchy protein network in a dough, and a soft crumb depends on that.
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• It makes cookies spread. Sugar is one of the things that decide how far a cookie flows across the pan.
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• It shapes texture. In ice cream, sugar adds body and helps stop lactose, the milk sugar, from forming the crystals that make a frozen dessert feel grainy.
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• It preserves, as long as there is enough of it.
• It feeds yeast. Sugar gives yeast food it can use at once, so the yeast makes more carbon dioxide and the dough rises faster and more evenly.
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How sugar crystallizes, and how cooks stop it, belongs with heat. see chapter 7: Sugar How yeast turns sugar into gas is covered with fermentation. see chapter 26: Alcohol and gas

Simple and double sugars

Every sugar is a carbohydrate, built from carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. Chemists group sugars by how their atoms are arranged.

• Monosaccharides, the simple sugars, are single units. Dextrose (another name for glucose) is the main one. Fructose (also called levulose) occurs in honey and in many fruits; galactose is a sugar of milk. Simple sugars are slow to crystallize.
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• Disaccharides are double sugars. Sucrose, ordinary table sugar, is the chief example; maltose from cereals and lactose from milk are two more.
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• Polysaccharides include starches, dextrins and cellulose. Bakers leave these aside when they talk about sugar.
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Simple and double sugars both sweeten, but they act differently in a finished product, so one cannot simply replace the other. Most names of sugars end in "-ose". Sucrose is the chemical name of the sugar taken from sugar cane and sugar beet.

Food labeling rules sort these words too. On a nutrition label, "sugars" means all the simple and double sugars. A "sweetener", by contrast, is a food additive: the sugar alcohols (such as sorbitol, xylitol and erythritol) and intense sweeteners such as aspartame and sucralose.

From cane and beet to the bag

Raw sugar reaches the refinery full of impurities and is not legal to eat as it is. At the refinery it goes through several steps.

• It is washed and boiled.
• It is filtered.
• It is boiled down under a vacuum until crystals of the wanted size form; the vacuum keeps the sugar from caramelizing.
• A centrifuge spins the syrup away from the crystals.
• A drum of hot air dries them, and the sugar is packed.

Beet sugar starts differently, with sliced beets soaked in hot water to draw out the sugar, then cleaned, filtered and concentrated, and after that it follows the same steps as cane. Machines handle the sugar from start to finish.

Refined sugar must be at least 99.5% sucrose.

Brown and yellow sugars come only from cane refineries. The syrup left after the white sugar is spun off is cleaned again and boiled a second time. Its crystals are spun but not washed, so a film of syrup stays on them, and that film carries the color and flavor. Brown sugar can also be refined sugar with molasses added back. Light brown sugar is less refined than granulated sugar and coated with molasses, and dark brown is less refined again.

Bone char and vegan baking. Many refiners whiten cane sugar by filtering it through bone char, made from cattle bones. Other refiners use granular carbon or an ion-exchange system. A company that uses bone char for white sugar also uses it in the brown sugar and icing sugar made from it. Beet sugar never goes through bone char, and nor do sucanat and turbinado sugar. In Canada, only the Vancouver cane refinery uses it, while the beet factory in Taber, Alberta, and the Montreal cane refinery do not.

Kinds of sugar and what they suit

Syrups and other sweeteners

Molasses is what is left when cane juice is refined into white sugar. It holds sucrose and other sugars, organic acids and minerals. Light molasses comes from the first boiling of the cane juice. Dark molasses comes from the second; it is less sweet and has more flavor.

Corn syrup and glucose. Glucose occurs naturally in most fruit, but the glucose bakers buy is made from corn starch. It comes as a thick syrup, adjusted to an even thickness and graded by its dextrose equivalent (DE). Corn syrup is the form most cooks know. It holds glucose and maltose in amounts that vary with how it was made. It does four jobs:

• softens texture
• adds volume
• stops sugar from crystallizing
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• lifts flavor

Light corn syrup is clear and may carry added vanilla or salt; dark corn syrup is light corn syrup mixed with refiners' syrup.

High-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is corn syrup in which an enzyme has turned part of the glucose into fructose, which tastes sweeter than sucrose. It is about half fructose and half dextrose, and it is the main sweetener in factory-made bread and buns.

Dextrose is chemically the same as glucose and is sold as dry crystals. Compared with sucrose, it:

• ferments easily
• helps bread and buns brown
• stays dry rather than greasy, which is why it goes into doughnut sugars
• draws in and holds moisture
• slows crystals forming in syrups, candies and fondant
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Glucose is only about three quarters as sweet as sugar, and a syrup is partly water, so more of it is needed to replace sugar. Multiply the weight of sugar by the factor below.

These syrups do not suit every bake. A white layer cake made with glucose or HFCS in place of sugar browns too much.

Honey is nectar that bees have changed with an enzyme, invertase, which makes it essentially an invert sugar. On average it is about 40% fructose, 35% dextrose and 15% water, with traces of ash, wax and gum; the exact make-up and flavor depend on the flowers.

Bakers reach for honey for four reasons.

• to sweeten
• for its own flavor
• for the moist bite of gingerbread and certain cookies
• to help goods keep

It comes in several forms.

• Comb honey is still in the comb the bees built. Chunk honey is pieces of comb in liquid honey.
• Liquid honey is taken from the comb and strained; most bakers use this kind.
• Creamed honey is liquid honey given body with some crystallized honey stirred in. Granulated honey has crystallized, and dehydrated honey comes as granules.
• Blended honey mixes honey with manufactured invert sugar, or blends several honeys for color, aroma and consistency.

In the United States honey is graded by color, from white (orange blossom) through amber (clover) to dark amber (sage, buckwheat).

Honey pulls moisture from the air, so keep it tightly covered, dry and at room temperature. A fridge or freezer will not spoil its color or taste, but it may make it crystallize sooner. To bring crystallized honey back to liquid, warm it in a double boiler, no hotter than 58°C (136°F).

Malt is a sweetener made mostly from barley. As the grain sprouts, its own enzymes turn much of its starch into maltose, which has a flavor of its own. It is sold in four forms.

• Malt flour causes trouble unless it is weighed exactly.
• Malt syrup is heavy, bulky and sticky.
• Malt extract.
• Dried malt is the easiest to use, as long as it is kept away from damp.

Malt also comes in two kinds.

• Diastatic malt is dried at a low heat, so its enzymes stay active.
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• Non-diastatic malt is darker. High heat has killed its enzymes.
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Both kinds bring sweetness, color and flavor. Their particular value in bread is timing: yeast eats glucose and fructose early in fermentation, and turns to the malt sugar later, so malt keeps feeding the dough. Malt does more besides.

• It draws in moisture, so bread keeps longer.
• It helps the crust brown.
• It adds vitamins and amino acids.
• It strengthens gluten.

Flour from a good mill usually carries enough enzymes already, so most bread bakers do not need diastatic malt. Where it is used, medium activity is the recommended level.

To swap dry diastatic malt for malt syrup, use about the same weight; the factory has already raised the enzyme level of the dry kind. The dry kind holds about 20% less moisture, so add water to make up the difference.

Maple syrup is maple sap boiled down. Sap is only 2 to 3% sugar, so almost 40 liters of it make 1 liter of syrup, and that makes maple syrup costly. Canada produces 84% of the world's supply and the United States the rest.

Maple syrup is sorted into Grade A and Processing Grade, which carries no color name. Grade A comes in four color and flavor classes:

• golden, with a delicate taste
• amber and rich
• dark and robust
• very dark and strong

For baking, the darker syrups are better, because their flavor is stronger. Maple sugar, the solid left when nearly all the water is boiled off, also carries maple flavor and can stand in for cane sugar. Pancake or table syrup is not maple syrup: it is cheap glucose or corn syrup with caramel color and maple flavoring.

Other syrups. Agave nectar comes from the sap at the heart of the agave, a desert succulent that is also the source of tequila; it is made in much the way sugar is. Sorghum syrup is the boiled-down sap of sorghum cane.

Sugar substitutes

Sugar substitutes are food additives, and a new one is allowed only after a safety review and a change to the food regulations. Those approved include:

• saccharin
• sucralose
• stevia
• aspartame
• acesulfame-potassium
• thaumatin
• polydextrose
• sugar alcohols such as sorbitol, isomalt, maltitol and xylitol
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Take care when you swap one into a recipe. Even when it tastes about as sweet, a straight one-for-one swap rarely works, because sucrose does more than sweeten.

• It gives the mix bulk.
• It takes up moisture.
• It tenderizes.
• It keeps the product moist so it lasts longer.
• It gives color as it caramelizes.

A substitute may do none of these.

Try it: dry heat on sugar

Watch sugar caramelize.

• Spread half a cup of sugar evenly in an iron skillet and heat it slowly until every crystal has melted.
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• Pour half onto a greased, warm plate.
• Stir baking soda quickly into the rest and pour it onto a second plate.
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• Compare the two for color, texture and flavor.