Easy Kitchen Tip – Saving Hard Brown Sugar

I live in Calgary, the weather here is brutally dry. Even if you make sure to seal your brown sugar after you use it, it is, more often than not, the consistency of a brick. I have spent many frustrated moments trying to figure out how to get tiny briquettes of brown sugar to incorporate into a recipe. It is not easy and it doesn’t really work.

Last night, I noticed that the brown sugar canister in the cabinet was empty. I found the bag of brown sugar I bought a week ago. I think you could have used it to build a house. It was a solid, unyielding brick that I couldn’t even get in to my canister!

Like the game show….it was time to phone a friend. I was DONE with dealing with sugar bricks. Maybe I’m late to the party but I’ve never really found anything that worked to fix it. I had one of those terra cotta bears for a while and it did NOTHING. I was pretty sure that I would end up throwing the brown sugar brick away but thought one last ditch effort to save it was worth a try.

My friend Jen on Twitter said to try a crust of bread, a marshmallow or a slice of apple. Well, I didn’t want to cut up a whole apple for once slice or open a bag of marshmallows for one marshmallow so crust of bread it was. I will admit that I was tres’ skeptical (especially because my friend Jen is a self-proclaimed non-cook/baker). I threw half of the “butt” of our current bread loaf in to the canister with half of the sugar brick (the whole thing wouldn’t fit), sealed it up and left it over night.

This morning I pulled out the canister and the brown sugar was PERFECT. Yay! The poor bread crust was as crispy as a crouton. I shoved the rest of the sugar brick in and put in another piece of bread to save the rest. So cool!

As I said, I may be the last person on earth to know that this works but, just in case, I thought I would share it with you.

Happy baking!

What is your favorite easy kitchen tip?