If you’ve never lived overseas, you probably don’t know the joy of improvisational cooking.
Take brown sugar for example.
In China, it’s called hong tang (“red sugar” 红糖), because it’s reddish in color when mixed with water. It comes in lighter shades similar to what you might see in the west. It also comes in a darker, almost molasses-like shade.
Sometimes, it is relatively loose. Often, it has what we call “brown sugar rocks” or lumps of really hard sugar that need to be broken apart by mashing with a mallet or mixing with a hot liquid. If you don’t break them apart, your baked goods will have little, secret nuggets of brown sugar.
I found one kind of brown sugar that comes in hard sheets. Very fascinating! I haven’t tried cooking with that one yet.
You need to be careful when you buy brown sugar in China because sometimes they add flavors like ginger – which is nice in a ginger cookie or gingerbread house, but not so much in anything else.
By the way, did you know that nearly all the brown sugar that you buy in the States is really dyed white sugar? Did you also know that there aren’t really any health benefits to brown sugar vs white? (It’s not like brown rice or whole wheat.)
Brown sugar. Such a simple ingredient that takes on a new dimension in the cross-cultural light.
