East Texas Kitchen Care: Brown sugar hard as a rock? Here’s a hack and a recipe

TYLER, Texas (KLTV) - If you’ve ever opened your pantry to pull out your already opened bag of brown sugar to find that it’s hard as a rock, there are easy hacks to fix that. Let’s take a look.

First, you can purchase a brown sugar terra cotta disk. It’s just a piece of terra cotta, like clay pots are made of, which you soak in water. Then, you insert it into the bag. The moisture in the pottery softens the hardened sugar back to normal.

Another way to do it is to slice an apple, add the apple slices to the bag of hard sugar, and seal it back up. The moist apple will do the same thing, though it may impart some apple flavor to the sugar, which you may not want. Discard the apple when the sugar has returned to its softened state.

Finally, use a slice or two of fresh bread. Same principle; the moisture in the bread will soften the sugar. Leave it for several hours, then check. When it’s soft again, toss the bread, and use your sugar.

However, if you need brown sugar right away, these methods won’t help enough, so what do you do? Make your own brown sugar from scratch!

It’s easy. If you have molasses, which is the brown part of brown sugar, and some white sugar, you’re all set. Use a tablespoon of molasses per cup of white sugar to make light brown sugar. Use two tablespoons of molasses per cup of white sugar to make dark brown sugar.

You can use a food processor to mix this up, if you like, or you can simply put the ingredients into a glass bowl and whisk together by hand until the mixture looks like regular ol’ brown sugar. It only takes a few minutes.

Tip: To make sure all the molasses comes off the tablespoon, spray it with cooking spray first. The molasses won’t stick, but will slide right off. It keeps you from wasting your ingredient, and makes cleanup less messy. (Molasses makes everything around it so sticky, doesn’t it? Good thing it tastes so good.)

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