What is cane sugar?

[Freddy]

The Bradley briskett rub lists 'cane sugar dried in oven'... is this brown sugar and how do you dry it?

[Habanero Smoker]

Different geographical area have different terms. Generally cane sugar is commonly called raw sugar in my area. Raw sugar is generally dry and comes in large crystals, so there is no need to oven dry it.

When a recipe calls for dry the sugar in the oven, it is generally referring to brown sugar. If you are making a rub that has brown sugar in it and you want to store it for a while, then you would go through the trouble of drying it in the oven. If you are going to use the rub in a few days, there is no reason to dry it.

Some one on this forum does dry his brown sugar, hopefully he will reply.

[NePaSmoKer]

There are different forms of sugar. The most common is cane sugar. Cane is what we normally call table sugar. It is not widely used in sausage because it has a tendency to burn or scorch. Dextrose and brown sugar are used in most brines. Brown Sugar is sometimes used in meat because of its flavor. The most common sugar used in meat and brines is dextrose. Dextrose is corn sugar and it will not burn as easily as cane or beet sugar. When a recipe calls for cane sugar you can replace it with dextrose by adding 20-30% more dextrose than cane sugar due to the sweetness factor between cane sugar and dextrose.


nepas

[Bad Flynch]

This may or may not answer your question.

All commonly used table sugar is chemically, Sucrose. Sucrose is a very sweet disaccharide used the world over. Sucrose can be had as Cane Sugar, which is sucrose derived from the Sugar Cane crop. In the U.S., we also have Sucrose that is derived from the Sugar Beet crop and is called Beet Sugar. In addition, in the U.S., we have Sucrose derived from the Sugar Maple tree (Acer saccharum) called ***Ta Da*** Maple Sugar. Rarely, Sucrose is available in Sorghum Molasses (sometimes just called Sorghum), which is a molasses-like product cooked out of grain sorghum.

Usually only Cane Sugar is available in different forms. It is commonly available in two different colors of molasses (light and dark), two different colors of "Brown Sugar" (light and dark), caster sugar, raw sugar (which contains a fair amount of retained molasses) and so on.

As previously suggested, since your recipe calls for dried sugar, it probably means dried Brown Sugar because it comes quite damp in its factory packaging. When you dry it, occasionally stir it because it will clump together like small bricks if you do not. Do not melt it; that will make a bigger mess.

Other sugars sometimes used in cooking are Glucose/Dextrose, the most common source of which is Corn Syrup, although powdered Glucose/Dextrose is available. Glucose is not as sweet as Sucrose on a gram-per-gram basis, but offers some unique advantages. Fructose is commonly called Fruit Sugar and is available in powdered form. It is sweeter than Glucose/Dextrose and in this day and age, is derived from enzymatic action on Corn Solids. Sometimes Lactose, which is called Milk Sugar, is used in cooking, but that is really rare. Honey contains an equimolar mixture of Sucrose and Fructose called Invert Sugar and that is often used in cooking. It is not as sweet as Sucrose, but offers some advantages in certain situations.

I should point out that Invert Sugar and Sucrose are chemically identical as far as the body's metabolism is concerned. The difference is that Invert Sugar is a simple physical mixture of Glucose and Fructose. In Sucrose the Glucose and Fructose are combined chemically into one molecule, but then the body separates them.

Hope that helps.