Culinary Compendium of Cooking Cant 15 – Sugar
Why hello there, and welcome to Kitchen Catastrophe’s ongoing segment, the Culinary Compendium, where Jon defines helpful cooking terms for you, the mis-educated audience. Miss Hill, I hope you’re in attendance, and that this is a crowd ready to grasp 90’s feminist hip-hop jokes. Today’s topic: SUGAR. Let’s doo-wop that thing!
SUGAR
(n) One of SIX distinct complex carbohydrates that are sweet, and therefore desired in food. Includes MONOSACCHARIDES and DISACCHARIDES.
(n) variations of SUCROSE used in various cooking applications. These include BROWN SUGAR, WHITE SUGAR, RAW SUGAR, et al.
(adj) a term used to denote species or plants from which we derive table sugars, such as sugar cane or sugar beets
(n, colloquial) sexual or romantic affection, particularly kisses. (“Give me some sugar, baby.”)
(n, slang) SWEET, SWEET COCAINE.
Is this powdered sugar? Drugs? can YOU tell the difference?
MONOSACCHARIDES
(n) simpler forms of sugar (typically organized chemically as C6H12O6) that have a bunch of weird chemistry shit I don’t have time to unpack. (shit like “forms that refract light different directions”, which I’m sure means SOMETHING, but fuck if I know what.) Comes in three basic forms.
a FRUCTOSE – “Fruit sugar”, the sweetest of simple sugars, is found in table sugar, honey, fruits and root vegetables. Because of its relative potency, is used in many sweeteners, such as HIGH-FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP.
b. GALACTOSE – Despite sounding like a Fantastic Four villain, one of the simple sugars that forms the complex sugar LACTOSE. Least sweet simple sugar, and interestingly is part of what determines your blood type, in a way I lack the biological training to understand.
c. GLUCOSE – “Blood Sugar”. The form that that the body breaks down most carbohydrates and other sugars into, and the form transported via the blood stream.
Technically, since it’s the type of sugar that goes IN blood, it is also the kind of sugar you can get OUT of blood.
DISACCHARIDES
(n) More complex sugars, consisting of two molecules of simpler sugars combining, and pushing out one molecule of water. Thus, the chemical composition is C12H22O11. This makes them more difficult for the body to break down, allowing for longer sugar dispersal.
a. LACTOSE – “Milk Sugar”, a combination of Galactose and Glucose found in, obviously, milk and other dairy products. Processed by the chemical lactase, which many people lose as they get older (or are born with reduced amounts), creating Lactose-Intolerance.
b.MALTOSE – A sugar formed in grain germination, formed of two glucose compounds. One of the least sweet sugars, and produced when breaking down more complicated starches as a mid-point to creating glucose.
c.SUCROSE – “Table Sugar”, a molecule of fructose combined with a molecule of glucose. The form of “sugar” first derived and processed from honey, sugar cane, and sugar beets.
AGAVE NECTAR
(n) a product made by refining agave pulp, Agave nectar is 56% fructose, making it sweeter than “normal” white sugar. Being comprised mostly of fructose, it also has a lower glycemic index, meaning it moves blood sugar less.
The only downside to Agave Nectar is that the more of it used for food is less used for Tequila.
BROWN SUGAR
Wooo, buddy. Is this a tangled knot to unweave. Brown sugar essentially consists of two broad products. And they’re NOT the ones you’re thinking of. First though: a basic definition.
(n) a sugar product that retains MOLASSES in or on the crystals, in addition to basic sucrose. Can be used to refer to RAW SUGAR or REFINED BROWN SUGAR
a.RAW SUGAR – See below
b.REFINED BROWN SUGAR – Sugar that has undergone the refinement process to remove the MOLASSES and be made into "white“ sugar…and then recombined with molasses. This seemingly paradoxical approach allows greater control of molasses content in the end product, and tends to produce finer crystals. “Light” and “dark” brown sugar refer to different concentrations of molasses being reintroduced to the sugar.
CONFECTIONER’S SUGAR
(n) What they call Powdered Sugar in other countries.
(n) Just ground-up White Sugar.
(n) Has a middle point called CASTER/SUPERFINE Sugar, which is partially ground, and dissolves faster in liquids, and can be a real pain-in-the-ass to find in America when trying to use British recipes.
Casters mean something else, where I’m from.
Or, as they’re sometimes called, “mono-directional rolling facilitators”.
CORN SYRUP
Syrup. From Corn.
(n). Ugh, fine. I wanted noted I ALREADY TALKED ABOUT THIS, but: a sweetener made from Corn starch, containing highly complex oligiosaccharides (One of the steps above disaccharides, and not chemically considered a ‘sugar’ any more) along with maltose and glucose (corn syrup is called “glucose syrup” in some countries/industries). Used in recipes to add thickness or moisture where normal sugar wouldn’t. Distinct from HIGH-FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP
a. HIGH-FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP – Corn Syrup that has had its glucose modified into fructose through enzymatic exposure. This produces a much sweeter product that is used widely in America to replace sugar, for economic reasons. (The cost of sugar cane in America is higher than that of corn, due to various economic details such as quotas on domestic sugar cane production, tariffs on foreign sugar-cane imports, and subsidies of corn.) HFCS is also easier to transport and handle than sucrose (due to the increased difficulty of it re-crystallizing). While broadly condemned as being tied to the Obesity Epidemic, chemically, HFCS has little to distinguish it from other sugars. The issue is not corn syrup itself, but rather the over-sweetening of American foodstuffs in general.
MOLASSES
(n) the liquidous product left when you pull sugar crystals from the “mother liquor” of sugar cane pulp/juice. A bittersweet compound, molasses forms different flavors and colors the more it’s processed, growing darker and more bitter with each boiling (which produces more sugar crystals to be harvested for further refinement.) First boil or “A” Molasses (also called “cane syrup” is, rather obviously, molasses formed from boiling the mixture one time to produce sugar. Second boil or “B” molasses is the style of molasses most widely used in cooking and food preparation, while Third boil is “blackstrap” molasses, the most robustly flavored.
a.Interestingly, molasses tends to retain and concentrate the minerals and vitamins of the sugar cane plant, which remain in the liquid when the sugar is removed. A single tablespoon of B molasses contains 20% of the daily recommended Iron, Magnesium, calcium and manganese.
2. (n) The Butts of burrowing mammals.
“Hur hur, troin’ to get a look at me heinie, are you?”
RAW SUGAR
Any form of brown sugar that, rather than being fully processed, instead retains molasses content due to a lack of refinement. This does not mean that the sugars are always truly “raw” ie, fully unprocessed, but rather that they have not yet been fully refined. Contains a wide variety of products, of confusing designations, as many classifications have no international or industry standards, meaning that a given producer may choose to use the labels as they see fit. (ie, while IN GENERAL, Demerara is larger than Turbinado, that may not be true for a given company)
a. DEMERARA – A minimally processed sugar of larger grain and lighter hue than TURBINADO, it is named for the Demerara region of Guyana in South America, where it was grown by British colonies.
b. MUSCOVADO – A corruption of the Portuguese “mascavado”, meaning…”brown”. (itself connected to “mascabado”, meaning “bruised”) Muscavado sugar is a minimally refined sugar with a very high molasses content, often making it darker than commercial “dark” brown sugar.
c. TURBINADO - Sugar that has been minimally processed, often from the “first press” of a sugar cane plant, and the first boil of molasses, often lightly processed by centrifuge rather than chemicals. (“Turbinado” meaning “spun” or “turbined” sugar) . Retains a caramel-like flavor, and is used as a topping on baked goods.
WHITE SUGAR
(n) Refined sucrose crystals, where molasses has been removed from the sugar grains. Functionally pure (99.7% or something) sucrose
The pure shit, amigo.
see, you don’t even know if THIS isn’t cocaine.
Whew. What a lot of details. And we didn’t even COVER like, Baking sugars or differing origin sugars, or really discuss the whole process of sugar refinement. (Pro-tip, if you’re vegan, make sure to find beet sugars or check your white sugar bags: white sugar is often made using bone char, which is…exactly what it sounds like, charred animal bones.) Rest assured, we’ll cover those details in depth some time, but we can’t eat the elephant all in one bite, as it were.
MONDAY: WHO YOU GONNA CALL? A BARTENDER
THURSDAY: I DUNNO. YOU THINK I’D HAVE FIGURED THIS OUT, BUT I WAS PLAYING A LOT OF BORDERLANDS 3, AND SEEING SHOWS, SO I LOST MY THINKING TIME.
