I used to think sugar was simple. It’s a naturally occuring carbohydrate found in fruits and vegetables, right? Well lately it’s gotten more confusing in the popular press. What’s the difference between – sucrose, fructose, dextrose, maltose…? These are all different versions of sugar that are digested in different ways and at that I’ll leave the rest of the explanation to the chemists. At Zingerman’s Candy Manufactory we choose our sugar based on its flavor and how it reacts to cooking. We use white granulated cane sugar, muscovado brown sugar from Mauritius, corn syrup (not high fructose) and honey. We use cane sugar because of it’s clear flavor and how it reacts to cooking which is different from, say, beet sugar. Muscovado brown sugar has an incredible rich and varied flavor relative to typical brown sugar available in our grocery stores. Most American brown sugar is made by processing sugar into white sugar and then adding molasses back in. Muscovado brown sugar is never processed all the way to white sugar and you can tell. It’s very caramel-like and flavorful. Honey has great and very different flavor from sugar so we use it where we want its distinctiveness.

Thursday, September 10, 2009, the Rachel Ray show featured our bars as their snack of the day.