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Sugars Part Three: Using Brown Sugar & Browned Butter Fudge Recipe

Brown sugar is one of the true delights of the sugar world. It comes in many forms, including light, dark, demerara, turbinado, and muscovado. In some countries, a form called jaggery is very common,  (and I’m so in love with the flavour of jaggery that I’ve given it its own post, coming soon).

Brown sugar is all sugar – it is essentially table sugar that still has molasses content remaining in it from the refining process, and the colour and flavour variations are produced by varying levels of molasses and size of the sugar crystals. Brown sugar isn’t more or less healthy than any other sugar, though some folks like to claim it is.

Brown sugar can be used for most applications that white sugar can be used for, however, it has a different water content, resulting in slightly different chemistry, and  it will affect the colour and flavour of the final profile. Sometimes, as in the recipe below, this is to our advantage. I have always found traditional vanilla fudge to be too cloyingly sweet for my liking, so I made a version with browned butter and brown sugar for a richer, more mellow flavour.

Browned Butter and Brown Sugar Fudge

Ingredients

1100g brown sugar

300g whipping cream

80g salted butter, plus 10g for greasing the pan

10g vanilla

Method

1. Grease a 9×9 glass pan with butter.

2. Brown the remaining butter by melting it in a saucepan over medium heat until it starts to brown and smell nutty. Remove from the saucepan and set aside.

3. Place the cream and brown sugar into the saucepan and stir over medium heat until blended, then allow to cook to 112℃. As always when cooking sugar, periodically wash down the sides of the pan to prevent uncontrolled crystallization. At the end of cooking, stir in the browned butter and vanilla.

4. Pour the hot mixture carefully into a stand mixer and mix until creamy and smooth. The fudge will look shiny at the beginning and will start to look dull as it is ready to come out.

5. Pour into your prepared pan and allow to cool before cutting. Serve as is, or enrobe in chocolate.

To read the other posts in this series click on our Bean2Bonbon Blog overview page.

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Photography by Jessica Washburn, Bliss Chocolatier and Ecole Chocolat