Recently in Food Category

Okay, there's been a lot of tech coverage here lately, so here's a really basic cooking tip. Heck, it doesn't even directly involve cooking. But if you've done any amount of cooking or baking, you've probably come across rock hard brown sugar. A new brown sugar box comes with sugar in a plastic bag. When you first open it, the sugar is very soft. If you just store your sugar in the opened original bag, it will quickly dry out and become rock hard and useless. Thankfully, this is not permanent. The molasses in the sugar has just dried out, and needs to be re-hydrated. [As an aside, did you know that most brown sugar is white sugar with molasses added back in? It's not "more raw" than white sugar. Dark brown sugar just has more molasses than light brown sugar.] There are a number of different ways to reverse the dehydration, but my favorite are these small terra cotta disks, which you can get for about $3 from various places including Sur La Table and Cracker Barrel: