G'day Craig,

I hadn't been following this post, but happened to open your latest
contribution tonight. So, stepping back a bit:

In article >,
wrote:
>On Tue, 06 Sep 2005 12:08:11 GMT, Rhonda Anderson
> wrote:
>
>>>>Most brown sugar available today, whether dark or light, is actually
>>>>refined white sugar with molasses added back in (in varying quantities).
>>>
>>> All the brown sugar available to me is just what it says, brown
>>> (i.e. not fully refined) sugar.

Are you really sure about that. My connections in the industry always
said retail "brown sugar" was simply refined sugar with molasses added
back. This goes back several decades, so things may have changed in
recent years -- certainly things are changing pretty rapidly since
"deregulation" got into swing and individual mills are being allowed
to sell product directly to the market instead of it all going to the
central marketing organisation.

One reason for the "refine and replace" procedure had to do with food
regulations which pretty much precluded mills doing their own thing as
their manufacturing operations did not comply. (Not enough stainless
steel around the place. ;-)

The only "brown sugar" I know that is not a reconstituted product is
"raw sugar" -- the lighter coloured crystals that the mills produce as
a commodity product. Some mills also occasionally produced "mill
white" which was (is?) basically raw sugar simply given a bit more of
a wash going through the fugals. The old sugar regulations allowed
mills (the co-op ones anyway; not sure about CSR etc.) to sell a
limited amount of "mill white" to their cane suppliers each season.

All that said, I guess it's quite possible for a mill to produce a
form of "brown sugar" for retail sale now, given factory equipment
that meets the food regulations. It could be easily done -- the old B
Grade fugals produced a pretty similar product years ago, but at that
time I think it was mostly (all?) recycled through the crystallisation
process so the sucrose was recovered as normal raw sugar.

>>Long time no see. Just wondering what brand brown sugar you get up there?
>
>Bundaberg.
>
>> I usually just get CSR (not even sure what else is on the shelf at Woolies).
>>Just checked CSR's site, and it gives cane sugar and cane syrups as the
>>ingredients for brown sugar, and for dark brown sugar - which I would take
>>to mean that it is refined sugar with sugar syrup added back in.
>
>It seems so. I worked as CSR many decades ago, and at that time
>there was no added sugar ...
>
>Just used some brown sugar in tonight's prawn curry.


Cheers, Phred.

--
LID