raw sugar

Raw sugar, the refined juice of Saccharum officinarum, turns up in six recipes. The tamarind drink takes 60 g (about 5 tbsp), stirred in with the salt and adjusted to taste. The egg-free brownies take 60 g, stirred into melted ghee over low heat for a minute or two. The protein oat waffles whisk in 18 g, one to two tablespoons. The rest take 4 g each: added to taste after the two-minute steep in the sage and black tea, optional in the strawberry-banana smoothie, and stirred in with the grounds as one level teaspoon for an orta Turkish coffee, left out for sade. In the brownies and waffles the library traces maltol, a compound that smells of caramel, to the sugar and the flour together.

The Journal's note on preservation shows sugar doing a second job. Like salt, dissolved sugar lowers the vapour pressure of the water around it, and the effect depends on how many particles are dissolved, not what they are. Honey, mostly glucose and fructose at a molecular weight of 180, therefore holds water down better than sucrose at 342, with roughly twice the particles per gram. In a 2025 persimmon study, fruit osmotically dehydrated in sucrose before freeze-drying kept about twice as much of one volatile as the control, 1,065.92 micrograms per kilogram against 535.40. The note's reading is that sugar builds a dense matrix around aroma molecules, so they leave more slowly.

The Journal's note on sweet taste starts at the receptor: sugars, synthetic sweeteners and sweet proteins all activate the same two-subunit receptor, T1R2 and T1R3. It also warns that every sweetness multiplier is soft. The paper that introduced brazzein reported it as 2,000 times sweeter than sucrose against a 2 per cent sucrose solution and 500 times against a 10 per cent one, for the same protein in the same laboratory on the same afternoon.