Last week when we were in Cincinnati, I noticed a different package in the baking aisle at Meijer: beet sugar, which as far as I know, I haven’t tried. So I bought a package — so far so good, can’t really taste a difference in my coffee… I’m baking something for SHF this week, and now that I’ve done a bit of research I’m kinda nervous about what the results may be:

Here’s more info on cane sugar vs. beet sugar, from from SFGate.com. There are several other articles if you care to Google, none of them very encouraging when it comes to baking. Yikes!

Another reason to be thankful for my co-op, which lists information on their catalog — the choices are dizzying but I am starting to understand why.

There’s

  • granulated cane sugar
  • ecosweet cane sugar (ecologically grown, without chemicals)
  • raw sugar (what’s left after processing the sugar cane to remove molasses)
  • turbinado sugar (fine-grained, crunchy sugar made by concentrating sugarcane juice without chemicals)
  • demerara sugar (large, golden crystals, partly-refined and treated with steam to remove impurities)
  • milled cane (unrefined sugar subtly flavored with molasses)
  • evaporated cane juice sugar (which does not undergo the same amount of processing as refined sugar so it retains more nutrients)
  • sucanat (unrefined sugar, grainier than regular sugar, with molasses added)
  • rapadura sugar (pure sugar, processed by squeeze-drying, without separating from molasses)

— maybe one of these days I’ll post pics of these different kinds of sugar!

And in the future, I’ll stick with my co-op’s offerings.