Level: Apprentice
Read Time: 12 minutes
Can I use (insert sugar of choice) and how do I use it? What recipe should I use?
This sugar article has technically been in the making for over a decade and I realized it was time to finally put it all together and fill in some gaps in my knowledge. To that end we made a bunch of chocolate, both dark and milk, with a wide array of sugars. Here is our cast of characters.
The Sugars:
Sucrose. This also goes by cane sugar, table sugar or just sugar. It comes from sugarcane.
Demerara sugar is cane sugar with a coarse grain and light tan color.
Turbinado sugar is often called “raw” sugar, but it isn’t really raw as it has been boiled. It has been refined enough to make it safe to eat while leaving in some of the molasses flavors and color.
Muscovado sugar is unrefined sugar that still retains its natural molasses content. It is a step less refined compared to turbinado. Sometimes it is a touch sticky.
Brown sugar is refined white sugar with some molasses added back in.
Maltose, Fructose and Allulose are different individual sugars.
Coconut sugar. Basically sucrose but obtained from coconut instead of sugarcane.
Date sugar. Dried and ground whole dates
Round 1:
Our first round of chocolate were 70% roasted nibs, 5% cocoa butter and 25% sugar. All chocolates were refined for 48 hours and tempered with silk. We tasted them all together, talking about them only after making our notes. The control was known. All others were tasted blind. Below are the abridged and consolidated notes.
Results:
Sucrose - The control. We used our unbleached sugar. The bean flavor came through fine and it is what we are all used to.
White, bleached sugar - It was fine but seemed to be missing just a little something but if it were not in direct comparison none of us thought we could have found any fault or hardly any issue with it.
Demerara sugar - Maybe a touch different from the control but so subtle as to be effectively indistinguishable.
Turbinado - Super similar to the Demerara. Subtle differences at best.
Coconut sugar - Being refined sucrose from another source, it tasted like the control.
Light Muscovado - Finally we get to a sugar that seemed to add a richness to the profile. Some found the profile flatter, so described it as taming the acidity. The difference seems to be if one likes a bright or bolder flavor profile.
Dark brown - There was certainly an effect there. Chewy, bold, strong. Whereas some found the flavor integrated there was a little bit of a consensus that by adding molasses to white sugar make the brown sugar made it disjointed. It was split down the middle of liking vs actively not liking it.
Dark Muscovado, panela/rapadura - All displayed a strong and generally unpleasant metallic flavor. Musky, bitter, harsh, strong and heavy handed were all used. Oh, and let us not forget ‘ick’.
For all of the darker sugars, their contributions were generally agreed upon to be distractedly overwhelming, eclipsing the origin flavor of the chocolate. Where the light sugars above were like light wind chimes tinkling in the wind or tapping of a delicate tack hammer, the brooding bad boys were sledge hammers in the subtlety department. Although we did not test them this way directly I suspect the less refined ones could be used in a supporting role. I would start with about 25% of your sugar as one of these dark and use everyday granular sugar or one of the light ones and go from there.
Maltose - Although I love this flavor on its own and in tasting malted beverages, we found there was a strange metallic taste when added to chocolate. I’ve seen this time an again over the years. It was no ones favorite.
Allulose - This goes by many names, d-allulose, psicose, d-psicose, or pseudo-fructose. It is a real sugar, thus its inclusion here. In short no one was deeply impressed as a standalone ingredient. It is only about 65-75% as sweet as sucrose so you must use a bit more for an equal level of sweetness. That is all well and good except you have to take away from something or the chocolate will not seem as sweet. In this recipe, it tastes like an 85% chocolate which honestly I’m not a huge fan. The other issue with allulose is that it seems to bond oddly in chocolate requiring more cocoa butter to keep the viscosity in check. That additional dilution of the recipe means less actual cocoa in there. While not necessarily bad, it leads to a rather mild and unoffensive, but not dynamic chocolate. Why might you use it? We humans don’t have the enzyme to digest it but we still taste it and being a sugar, instead of a sugar alcohol, does not tend to give any GI distress and it is diabetic friendly by not raising insulin levels at all.
Fructose - Basically see Allulose. It is just as not sweet without the benefit of not being diabetic safe.
Date Sugar - As a reminder, this is dried and ground whole dates with a large fiber component. This is probably the number one requested non-standard sugar. Sebastian over on my forum echos my thoughts about the why or why not people want it.
"I'll never understand what’s behind people's desire to try to find the superfood of sugars. Your body just doesn't care where the sugar comes from, and trying to use all these esoteric sources is both very expensive and ushers in a huge amount of processing difficulties that just don't need to be there. And at the end of the day - physiologically - your body just doesn't care where the sugar comes from, be it from sugar cane, sugar beets, palm sugar, coconut sugar, date sugar, or whatever. And no - this isn't an invitation to debate the pseudoscience of carbohydrate metabolism to support the perspective that 'my sugar is better than your sugar' or whatever bizarre theory Dr. Oz is peddling these days 8-) Nothing but heartache lies down the path you're starting on my friend. If you like the flavor of dates, just mix in some dates as inclusions.”
https://chocolatetalk.proboards.com/thread/2829/date-sugar
That though isn’t quite what we are here for. The dark date chocolate was generally panned as savage and worse than any of the unrefined dark sugars. The date was just too damn strong. Could you use less? Sure, of course. This is about horizontal tastes of 75% chocolate. The date flavor totally blew away and occluded the taste of the origin, which was not subtle to start with. It is up to you to determine if that is acceptable. For me, even when tasting commercial date chocolate, that was the impression I was left with. Dates. Good? Yes. Chocolate....I guess but that was not the final impression.
All of that lead us to wondering if the dark bad boys could be tamed or used well. We decided to try some of the tests again in milk chocolate. Given the subtle effects of the lighter sugars we decided they would do fine but probably be lost.
Round 2
The recipe was equal portions cocoa nibs (of course the same origin and even roast batch), cocoa butter, sugar and whole milk powder.
Results:
Date sugar - The taste of the dates was still really strong and lent a metallic taste to the chocolate. The panel of tasters were all over the board, some liking it, some disliking it and some just being whelmed by it. No one was blown away by it and it didn’t score as the best for anyone.
Dark Brown sugar - The molasses used to make the brown sugar came through quite a bit. The general vote was it was good. A couple people found it not to their taste but most liked the richness it provided.
Dark Muscovado - This one seems to have really hit the spot in this recipe with this nib. Your mileage my vary but this hit the complexity notes for most everyone. Rich without being overwhelming, contributing to the whole, not battling for dominance. I’d start here.
Maltose - I really enjoyed this one but I am also a real malt lover. Malted milk balls might be a guilty pleasure of mine. After that, the jury was out. Some found it a touch bitter and/or astringent, others just didn’t care for how it did or did not integrate. It is certainly worth a try.
Allulose - Talk about damning with faint praise here. It was fine....if you have to eat a diabetic friendly milk chocolate. The viscosity was extra high and required a little more cocoa butter and just didn’t seem to push any serotonin buttons. Whelming....but from past experience, WAY WAY better than sugar alternatives such as xylitol, sucralose, monk fruit or stevia.
Patterns & Recommendations:
Now that we have chatted about various sugar, let’s talk about patterns, and then we will go onto how you can use these in your chocolate.
The main pattern we noted is that the darker the sugar, the less consensus there was as to its suitability in dark chocolate. Mostly they seemed to overwhelm the origin flavor but in some instances some folks found this to their liking. The flip side of that is that any of the sucrose based light sugars worked just fine in dark chocolate but were both hard to tell apart and basically lost in milk chocolates.
How should you use them? I’m so glad you asked. For this I have some definitive recommendations. The most common question I get about different sugars is whether they need to be dried. For the most part (allulose is a special case, see below) you can dry any sugar without fear of harming it. The key is that you MUST dry sugars that crawl. Crawling is an indication that there is too much water in the sugar and you need to drive it away. What is crawling? They say a picture is worth 1000 words, so in lieu of (2.2 x 60 x 1000) 132,000 words have a look at this.
Got it? Good! Sexy isn’t it?
Basically the color does not matter. The name of the sugar does not matter. How it moves matters. If it crawls, dry it. If in doubt, dry it. You have spare time and are bored, dry it. It flows free and you are frugal with your time? Don’t dry it.
How to dry Crawling Sugar
To dry crawling sugar lay it out on a baking dish and put it in your oven on the lowest setting. That can be anywhere from 100-200 F. Allulose excepted, you won’t harm any of the sugars. Give them 2-6 hours depending upon how moist they are. They will probably clump together. Toss them in a blender and get the sugar flowing. Is it dried enough? See above about crawling.
The allulose we sell, although a touch clumpy at times, does not crawl and does not need to be dried. If you decide you want to dry it you need to do it very slowly on a low setting. It can melt pretty low. Try as I might I can’t get a solid consistent melting point to give you. It ranges as low as 136 F to as high as 225 F. I’ve found it safe keeping it below 170 F. And yes, I’ve tried drying it to see if that changes the viscosity issue. It didn’t.
Maltose or malt or DME (dry malt extract) melts at about 215 F. Be a little careful. I’ve never found it needed to be dried as I’ve never seen it crawl.
As for adding any of these sugars to chocolate, there is really nothing special at all. Aside from grinding up your freshly dried sugars, they don’t need any treatment and you can just add them to your chocolate in the refiner as usual.....except....there is always one which demands special attention.
And you know who. Date sugar, our resident savage and bad boy. I’ve heard of folks having issues with date sugar. It clumps up. It breaks the chocolate. It separates out.....except...I could never reproduce any of those issues. It worked just fine for me. I did make sure to dry it well and grind it after. I also made sure to add it slower than any other sugar because I heard the horror stories. I added it over the span of 4-6 hours compared to 30 minutes for any other sugar. For me, the trouble was just an urban myth. I’m not going to call it debunked; Maybe my three brands were just well behaved.
Maybe the sugar just knows who the hell it is dealing with (LOL).
Other Sugars and Tips:
I would be remiss if I did not talk about a few key sugar points and a couple other sugars.
Powdered or icing sugar - In short, don’t use it. It usually contains some anti-caking agent, often cornstarch and there is simply no reason to use it. Just don’t. And if you do, don’t ask me why your chocolate tastes or behaves strangely.
Maple sugar - If you can get it (most you will find are 60-90% sucrose with maple flavor) I would not recommend it. I freaking love maple syrup and sadly it just didn’t play with chocolate well at all. It is mostly fructose and so not very sweet and lends a strong, odd, metallic taste to the chocolate. I was sad, especially given how expensive it was.
Honey, liquid and dry - You can’t use honey in the traditional sense. It can’t be dried, it just turns into a gummy mess. It can’t be added as it to chocolate due to the water content. Contrary to people telling me there is honey powder out there I call urban myth again. 100% of the powdered honey I have found were like the majority of maple sugar out there. 80-90% sucrose, and 10-20% honey. If you really want to make honey sweetened chocolate, there are two techniques but one is a one way path (you get ONE chance to temper it) and technically due to the water content it is not technically a chocolate but a chocolate confection (chocolate you can temper more than once, confections you can’t).
One way path for honey chocolate.
There is also a much fussier method that produces real honey chocolate
My take on both of these is that the honey is as much of a brute as the date sugar. It just tasted of honey. It was not my thing. And see Sebastian’s comment above about your body not knowing or caring about the source.
Grinding your sugar
I guess you can do it if you want. It might take an hour off your refining time. I personally don’t find it worth the trouble.
Add your sugar ANY DAMN TIME you like
There is fake news about sugar added early will trap acids or volatiles or some such crap. There is no chemical mechanism to even make this a theory and I exhaustively tested it. 8 different chocolates, 3 different addition times and except for one outlier (a good scientist reports all data and does not cherry pick) not one of my 8 tasters could tell any of them apart. And that outlier? The control where I added the sugar first tasted the least acidic, so even that data debunked that adding sugar early traps acids. Oh, for the record, I am not calling anyone a liar. I am saying I got totally different results and that is good enough to debunk a theory. See the latest on not room temperature superconductor LK-99 for how science and peer review work.
And that is a wrap! Review time.
Review
The Good:
Use these however you want, mix and match and just don’t over think them. The all work well and don’t cause a huge difference and work nicely with origin flavor.
Granulated sugar, bleached
Granulated sugar, not bleached (this is what we carry)
Demerara sugar
Coconut sugar
Turbinado
Light Muscovado
The Bad:
They are not so much bad but have an issue playing with others and tend to be brutes. I would use them sparingly in dark chocolate or put them on the buddy system with one of the Good Ones. They also selectively do ok in milk chocolate.
Brown sugar, Dark and light
Dark muscovado
Panela/rapadura
The Ugly:
All of these just require a special circumstance, have special needs or really resist solid general suggestions or guidelines. You can use them but you are going to have to do the legwork yourself and see what suits your tastes and needs.
Date sugar (reigning champion and undefeated)
Honey (runner up savage)
Maltose
Fructose
Maple sugar
Allulose
And a final disclaimer. I’ve conveyed my and my crew’s tastes and experiences. If you like something we didn’t, great, but please don’t try and convince me something is universally good as I’m just going to say it is a matter of taste. And of course I’ve missed some sugars but I’m virtually positive if you take a moment to think and consider, they are going to fall into The Good, Bad or Ugly category. Finally, this was about sugars, not sugar alternatives. I didn’t forget them, I left them out.
Happy chocolate making everyone.
We finally have a timeline for the Alchemist’s Academy of Chocolate Making. Yes, that is a dropped hint. Stay tuned and subscribe if you don’t want to miss announcements.
