On 2016-03-21 9:34 AM, Cindy Hamilton wrote:
> On Monday, March 21, 2016 at 9:13:20 AM UTC-4, Dave Smith wrote:
>> On 2016-03-21 4:54 AM, Sky wrote:
>>> On 3/20/2016 12:31 PM, notbob wrote:
>>>> Making some oaty-meal cookies. Calls fer 1/3 C brn sugar. Arghhh!
>>>>
>>>> What brn sugar I have is pretty caked up. So, I jes dumped a buncha
>>>> lumpy brn sugar into my large wire strainer and used the fine particles
>>>> that sifted through. I then tossed the reamaining brn sugar rocks in
>>>> da' trash. I'll buy some new stuff next week.
>>>
>>>
>>> Just last week I read in a cooking magazine (e.g., Cooking Light, Food &
>>> Wine, Cook's Country, Cook's Illustrated, or Cuisine at Home) that
>>> keeping a marshmallow or two in with the brown sugar will keep it from
>>> bricking or getting clumpy. My guess is it works and might be a
>>> preferable alternative to a slice of bread ;-)
>>>
>>>
>>
>> What's wrong with a piece of bread in the sugar? It works almost like
>> magic. The bread in my sugar canister sits at the bottom and you don't
>> see it. You have no trouble digging your way down to it because it does
>> such a good job of keeping the sugar soft.
>
> Rather than mess around putting foreign objects in
> my brown sugar, I tightly close the plastic bag
> that it came in, then put it inside a Rubbermaid
> container that is reasonably air-tight. I open
> it every morning to get brown sugar for my oatmeal,
> and it never gets hard. By the end of the bag it's
> not as soft as when it was new, but it's eminently
> scoopable.


That sounds like a lot of work compared to what I do. Years ago I put a
lice of bread in the Rubbermaid tub. When I buy brown sugar I open the
bag and dump it into that old bin with that old piece of bread on the
bottom, and I never have a problem with sugar clumping.

There have been cases where we bought more sugar and left it in the bag
and it eventually clumped up into blocks. I dumped the rock like sugar
into the bin with that old slice of bread and by the next day I had
nice , moist, soft brown sugar.