What Einstein Told His Cook Read Online Free PDF Page A

aka levulose. (Some sugars have multiple names.) This mixture, called invert sugar, holds onto water tightly, so hydrolyzed brown sugar granules don’t dry out and cake. Brownulated sugar, however, is intended for sprinkling on oatmeal and such, not for baking, because it doesn’t measure out the same as the ordinary brown sugar that cookbooks specify.
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If you’re in a hurry to soften hard brown sugar, your trusty microwave oven will come to the rescue with a quick, but temporary, fix. Just heat the sugar for a minute or two on high, probing it every half minute or so with a finger to see if it’s soft yet. Because ovens differ so widely, no exact time can be stated. Then measure it out quickly because it’ll harden again in a couple of minutes. You can also soften the sugar in a conventional oven at 250º for 10 to 20 minutes.
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    BEET ME WITH A CANE
     
    What’s the difference between cane sugar and beet sugar?
     
    M ore than half of the sugar produced in the U.S. comes from sugar beets, misshapen, whitish-brown roots that resemble short, fat carrots. Sugar beets grow in temperate climates, such as in Minnesota, North Dakota, and Idaho in the U.S., and in much of Europe, whereas sugar cane is a tropical plant, grown in the U.S. mainly in Louisiana and Florida.
    Beet sugar refineries have the more difficult task because the beets contain many bad-tasting and foul-smelling impurities that must be removed. The impurities survive in the molasses, which is inedible and fit only for animal feed. For that reason there’s no such thing as edible brown beet sugar.
    Once refined, cane sugar and beet sugar are chemically identical: they’re both pure sucrose and therefore should be indistinguishable from each other. Refineries don’t have to label their sugar as cane or beet, so you may be using beet sugar without knowing it. If it doesn’t say “Pure Cane Sugar” on the package, it’s probably beet.
    Nevertheless, some people who have long experience in making jams and marmalades insist that cane and beet sugars don’t behave the same. Alan Davidson, in his encyclopedic Oxford Companion to Food (Oxford University Press, 1999), says that this fact “should cause the chemists to reflect, humbly, that they are not omniscient in these matters.”
    Touché.

     
A sugar beet.
Courtesy of the American Sugarbeet Growers Association.
     
    THE CLASSES OF MOLASSES
     
    My grandmother used to talk about sulphured molasses. What is it?
     
    T he “sulphur” in sulphured molasses is a good starting point for understanding several interesting aspects of food chemistry.
    Sulphur is the old-fashioned spelling for sulfur, a yellow chemical element whose common compounds include sulfur dioxide and sulfites. Sulfur dioxide gas is the choking, acrid odor of burning sulfur and is reputed to pollute the atmosphere in Hell, probably because volcanoes belch sulfurous fumes from the nether regions of our planet.
    Sulfites release sulfur dioxide gas in the presence of acids, so their action is the same as that of sulfur dioxide itself. Namely, they are bleaching agents and are anti-microbials. Both properties have been used in sugar refining.
    Sulfur dioxide has been used to lighten the color of molasses, the dark, sweet byproduct of sugar refining, and to kill its molds and bacteria. The molasses is then said to be sulphured. Virtually all molasses produced today is unsulphured, however. Sulphured molasses is not to be confused with Great-Grandma’s sulphur and molasses, a spring tonic that supposedly “purified the blood” after a hard, cold winter. She mixed a couple of teaspoons of gritty, powdered sulfur into some molasses and fed it to as many children as she could catch. The sulfur is harmless because it isn’t metabolized.
    Sulfur dioxide gas is used to bleach cherries white, after which they are dyed a Disneyesque red or green, then flavored with oil of bitter almonds, packed in syrup, and christened maraschino ,