Easy Homemade Brown Sugar

I don’t know about you, but I am ALWAYS running low on brown sugar. I know this blog is called “Salty Over Sweet” and yes I do very much prefer to eat savory foods over sweet foods, but I actually LOVE to bake. I normally share everything that I do bake and barely keep any for myself and my husband. I would say comfortably that I bake something at least 1-2 times a week. This was not always the case, when I was still living at home with my parents before getting married I didn’t really have access to the kitchen as often as I would have probably liked. My mom would ALWAYS be cooking something, and I am not the kind of person that likes to share her space when she’s cooking. When I am cooking, I prefer nobody to be in the kitchen with me, unless you have specifically been asked to be there, by me, for a very specific reason. So when my mom was always doing something, I would just leave the kitchen alone. This was not that big of a deal because obviously most my meals were coming from my mother. The only problem I ever ran into is that a lot of ingredients that I would buy, especially baking related ingredients would go bad before I could finish using them.

My mom cooked a lot when I was living at home, but my mom NEVER baked. So all the flours, and sugars that I would buy, would literally only ever be used by me. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to throw out bags of flour because they just got bad over time. When it came to brown sugar specifically, every time I bought a bag, eventually it would end up turning as hard as a rock, and I definitely DID NOT have the patience or the time to go through that whole leave a piece of bread in the brown sugar container overnight or any of those “wait a day for it to soften” techniques. I needed to take advantage of any opportunity I had to use the kitchen the moment it became available. Brown sugar is not so cheap either that I could just afford to keep throwing away bags of rock hard brown sugar whenever it got to that point.

That experience is what led me to this recipe. I must have found this recipe somewhere online probably 5-6 years ago, I wish I could give whoever I got it from credit, but I honestly just don’t remember where it came from. As soon as I found it I knew it was a keeper. I never had a problem storing white sugar over long periods of time, and molasses keeps forever in the fridge. Whenever I needed brown sugar I would just mix up a fresh batch in whatever amount I needed in that moment and be good to go. I never looked back after that. Since the first time I made this recipe I have never bought brown sugar from the store again. It is literally so incredibly simple to make, and way more cost-effective to do it this way. It’s even easier if you have a stand mixer, which I do have and usually use, but it’s so easy to do it by hand also, that I will just show you how to do it by hand so that in case you do not have a stand mixer, you will know that it does not matter.

 

Literally all you need is a bowl, a spoon for mixing, white sugar and molasses.

Literally all you need is a bowl, a spoon for mixing, white sugar and molasses.

Just add sugar in 1 cup at a time, and add 1 tablespoon of molasses for every cup of sugar you add.

Start mixing it together with a spoon, it will look weird at first, but keep mixing.

As you continue mixing, make sure you smush the clumps of molasses with your spoon to distribute it in the sugar.

You will notice that the sugar will begin to get darker

It is almost done by this point, but there are still some molasses clumps, keep mixing.

This is what it should look like when it it done =) Perfect fresh Brown Sugar ready to use immediately!

See how easy that was? It will literally take you no more than 10 minutes from beginning to end. Now you also will never buy brown sugar again. The flavor of this fresh brown sugar is much richer and deeper than any ready-made brown sugar you can buy from the store. Now I hope this goes without saying, but I think I should just clarify this here just incase… This brown sugar is the kind you buy in the regular grocery store called ” light brown sugar” or “dark brown sugar” this does not replace Turbinado Sugar or Raw Cane Sugar or any other kind of naturally brown unrefined sugar. I know that it can get confusing sometimes with all the different types of sugar out there, so I just wanted to clarify. I use this brown sugar primarily for baking, or me and my husband like to add this to our coffee instead of regular white sugar for a deeper flavor profile. You can adjust also whether this brown sugar is “light brown” or “dark brown” sugar based on the amount of molasses you use. The ratio I have here is just a good starting point. If you cannot find molasses at your local grocery store, then here is a link to the one I use on Amazon: Wholesomes Sweetners – Organic Molasses, 16 oz liquid.

These days I don’t usually have the problem of my flour going bad or my brown sugar going hard like I used to in the past. In fact, I have a big jar right now that holds 1 1/2 bags of flour on my countertop and I can go through one entire jar in a months time easily. You can see above the jar that I use to store my brown sugar. If you notice, the freshest batch is on the top, and you can kind of see that over time the brown sugar gets a little darker and a little bit denser over time the further down the jar you go. There’s probably brown sugar from at least 3-4 separate batches made at completely different times in this jar. Usually when it gets down to a certain level, I panic and make a fresh batch just so that the jar is full whenever I need it. So I’ve never actually gotten to the bottom of this jar which is why it’s so dark down towards the bottom. I love these jars that have the rubber seal to store things like flour and sugar. This is similar to the kind that I use: Glass Canister Quality Set of 3 Clear Round Jar with Hermetic Seal Bail & Trigger Airtight Lock for Kitchen – Food Storage Containers. Living in Florida, there is always a fear of ants getting into the house. When we first moved here, to say I had an ant problem would be an understatement. I had never experienced anything like what I did when I first moved here before. There would be a line of ants coming from some unknown location walking along the walls in my kitchen to any type of moisture or sugar that was present anywhere. I was absolutely horrified. I immediately went to war with the ants, it was a long fought war on both sides that eventually ended in my calling in the cavalries (an exterminator) many months later that pretty much ended my problem. But I did find, pretty quickly, that proper airtight storage of any food related item, and cleaning all my surfaces after cooking was essential to giving the ants no reason to even try to come into my kitchen. I never had this problem living in Indiana and before that New Jersey so it was all very new to me to be so careful. I would not call myself a messy person in general, but the first time I realized I really had a bad problem was when I had bought one of those clear plastic boxes of croissants from Whole Foods for our contractors to have for breakfast when they were coming to work on our house, and literally just left it on the counter overnight and by the morning, every single croissant was covered in hundreds of little ants. It was terrifying. Anyways, a little over a year later, I no longer have that issue, but the lesson is, definitely be careful how you store your flours and sugars. =)

 

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