Muffin Secrets

So I have been emulating Andrew Brinkman, baking muffins and distributing them at the GSB. His were apparently cornless corn muffins with blueberries. Mine were apple oatmeal brown sugar. Now let me explain something about brown sugar.

When we're growing up, we're taught that brown sugar is a less refined version of white sugar. It certainly has more flavor, and it's suitable for things like oatmeal or cream of wheat. The dirty secret, though, is that most brown sugar is actually white sugar with added molasses. It's a bit like brown sugar from concentrate.

I first noticed legitimate brown sugar in little packets of Sugar in the Raw. Unfortunately, baking with it is difficult because the grains are large and don't dissolve easily. These days, though, you can find a decent variety of authentic brown sugars. The one I've been using lately is Billington's. The one downside of Billington's is that sometimes the light brown sugar gets a bit dry and hardens up into a brick. As the package says, though, if you leave it in a bowl with a wet cloth draped over it, it soon returns to normal. Oh, one more downside: it's quite expensive relative to regular brown sugar. The flavor really is richer, though.

They even have fair trade sugars. Now, I don't know how I feel about fair trade, so that will have to be a post for another time. I will say this, though: truly fair trade would mean dismantling our sugar quotas and allowing free entry into the market. I suspect that this would result in a much wider variety of unrefined brown sugar, though of course the real point would be to increase incomes in poor sugar-producing countries.