Honey and syrups made from concentrated fruit juice were the earliest known sweeteners. There are several different types of sugar that add a range of caster sugar, tints and flavours to cooking. These broadly fall into two categories, brown and white sugars.

Learn more with our guide, sugar explained. Try adding a pinch of sugar to tomato sauces to bring out the natural sweetness of the tomatoes. Melt in a dry frying pan into an amber caramel before drizzling or cooling, or add a pinch to salad dressings to balance acidity. Sugar is a staple ingredient in sweet and savoury cooking.

It’s the same as normal caster sugar, but it’s unrefined, so has more caramel flavours. With its coarse texture, it creates a lovely, crunchy topping for cakes, cupcakes and crumbles. Light brown soft sugar: a popular sugar for making fruit cakes and puddings where a rich, full flavour is required. It’s damp and denser than caster or demerara. Dark brown soft sugar: looks as its name suggests, and has a richer flavour.

It works well in cakes, gingerbread, pickles and chutneys. It has more bitter notes than other sugars, and is reminiscent of treacle in flavour. Light and dark muscovado sugar: relatively unrefined, with much or all of the molasses still remaining. It has a dark, treacle-y flavour which is ideal in sticky gingerbread or rich fruit cakes. They taste sweeter than their counterparts, with less complex flavour profiles. Granulated sugar: this sugar makes a good addition to a cup of tea or sprinkled over fresh fruit such as strawberries.

It’s a good all-purpose sugar for cooking. Caster sugar: finer than granulated, caster sugar dissolves more easily, making it ideal for cakes, custards and mousses. It’s also perfect for snowy white meringues. Icing sugar: also known as confectioner’s sugar, this is white sugar ground to a fine powder with the addition of an anti-caking agent, such as calcium phosphate or cornflour. It dissolves on contact with liquid and is therefore used to sweeten foods that are not going to be heated and require a smooth texture. It is also used for dusting cakes and desserts, and as the name suggests, for various types of icing including buttercream and glacé icing. This website is published by Immediate Media Company Limited under licence from BBC Studios Distribution.

Discover the different qualities of each type of sugar and what they are used for. This is the latest accepted revision, reviewed on 6 January 2023. This article is about the class of sweet-flavored substances used as food. For common table sugar, see Sucrose. Sugar is the generic name for sweet-tasting, soluble carbohydrates, many of which are used in food. Simple sugars, also called monosaccharides, include glucose, fructose, and galactose.

Starch is a glucose polymer found in plants, the most abundant source of energy in human food. Sugars are found in the tissues of most plants. Honey and fruits are abundant natural sources of simple sugars. Sucrose is especially concentrated in sugarcane and sugar beet, making them ideal for efficient commercial extraction to make refined sugar. As sugar consumption grew in the latter part of the 20th century, researchers began to examine whether a diet high in sugar, especially refined sugar, was damaging to human health.