Using unrefined sugar to make candy
I have been trying to avoid refined sugar (white sugar, corn syrup, etc.) for health reasons. usually I replace it with demerara sugar, but I can also use honey, date syrup, unrefined cane sugar.
Is it possible to make candy (that will taste good) without the refined sugar? Are there some candies that will work better than others?
Best Answer
This history of candy is rife with how to make candy from different sources of sweet, which also in turn means there is a huge amount of regional and cultural variety based on what is available to a local candy maker. The recipes are going to be VERY different with vast variations of end results.
Think honey based candies...Mary Janes, bit o honey are nothing like any other candy. Nougat is another platform for candy that can't be hardened. Hard toffees (like a brittle think Heath and skor) soft toffees, or baked seed candies have honey in them that isn't "hard" but it's stiffened by baking and drying.
Look for recipes that use your chosen primary ingredient. You might have to hunt a lot and learn new keywords other than "candy".
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What sugar is best for candy making?
1. Ingredients. Use the best sugar you can afford. Organic unbleached sugar or brown sugar is best.How do you use unrefined sugar?
Unrefined sugars are perfect 1:1 substitutes in any recipe calling for regular refined brown sugars. For the most part, you can directly swap table sugar with unrefined and raw sugars in cookies and some cakes [but not for fine-textured and fancy cakes, puddings, or desserts where smoothness is desired].Can you substitute raw sugar for refined sugar?
When using sugar in a recipe that doesn't require creaming, such as sweetening a pie filling, white sugar and raw sugar can be interchanged without any impact on the finished product.How to Make Rock Candy | Easy Homemade Rock Candy Recipe
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Answer 2
The closer your sugar is to white refined sugar, the better your recipe will work. Unrefined cane sugar and demerara are both quite good choices. They just have a tiny bit of molasses, else they are almost the same thing and behave very similar to white refined sugar.
Honey has a lot of water, around 17%. The same goes for many other syrups (date syrup, agave syrup). Changing a recipe to work with those will need a lot of experimentation, costing you time and materials. I wouldn't recommend doing it. You can try finding a recipe developed with those in mind.
Other sugars such as pure dextrose or fructose also won't behave the same way as standard white sugar, even though they have no water content. You'll need new recipes for them too.
Answer 3
No, unrefined sugars do not produce the same results when cooking it to anything above a soft ball candy stage. IT takes much longer to reach those temperatures and when it does the results are very grainy with that distinctive pronounced natural Cane flavor that flavorings will not be able to mask.
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