As a baker, you pour a lot of sugar from paper bags. These sugars can have a variety of differences in texture, color, and taste. Sweeteners can also play a significant role in cookies, especially when baking for a certain size or shape. And plain white sugar doesn’t always correlate with every cookie variety. So what gives?
Turning to AIB International Baking Professional, Alison Bjerke-Harvey, she sheds some light on this sweet subject. Granulated sugar plays a unique and important role in cookies as it becomes a key structural component in the finished product, in addition to providing color and flavor, and being the main ingredient that influences the spread of the cookie. Using different types of sugar (smaller or larger particle size, or the use of liquid sweeteners) will have differing impacts on each product.
Rather than continuing to experiment with different types of sugars, Bjerke-Harvey recommends growing your knowledge base of sweeteners. Cookies are a particularly low-moisture product, which causes sugar to provide unique textural qualities. During the baking process, sugar goes through a phase change, and melts, turning into a liquid, and creating a matrix of sugar syrup throughout the dough as the cookie bakes. (This is also how sugar influences the spread, or diameter, of the cookie – as the sugar turns to liquid, the dough softens, causing the product to spread and increasing the diameter of the cookie). As the product cools after baking, that web of sugar syrup recrystallizes to form an important structural component to the cookie, making it harder and more crunchy. Using liquid sugars will have a different effect and create a range of soft to chewy textures and restrict the spread of the cookie.
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