Everything You Need to Know About Sugar

In the United States, Domino is by far the most well-known brand on the market. It’s what we stock in the test kitchen and what most people buy to bake with at home if they’re not buying a store brand. With such a commodity ingredient, dominated by a single brand, does it even matter what you buy? 

Terms such as “raw,” “organic,” “pure,” and “cane” are common on sugar packaging, but what do they even mean? We’re here to break it all down and investigate.

Although sugar had been refined in India for centuries, granulated sugar as we know it today was made in Persia in the fifth century, according to historian Ulbe Bosma in his book The World of Sugar (2023). As the Greeks and Romans went to India, they brought sugar back, and it spread to Europe and the Middle East. Even as sugar's cultivation became more common and it's popularity grew, it was nowhere near as ubiquitous as it is today. In the 18th century, the average English person consumed just 4 pounds of sugar per year, according to a 2019 episode of the Netflix documentary series Rotten entitled “A Sweet Deal.” Today, Americans consume close to 40 pounds of refined sugar per year, according to the documentary. 

As demand soared in the early 16th century, production reached its capacity in the Eastern Hemisphere and sugar companies looked to the Americas to expand. Many enslaved Africans were forced to work on sugar plantations in the Caribbean, and it is estimated that up to two-thirds of the 12.5 million people who were taken from Africa and survived the journey to the Americas were sent to work on sugar plantations.

Sugarcane is an extremely labor-intensive crop to grow and harvest. Up until the late 20th century, it was primarily cut by hand, and some farmers still prefer this method over machine harvesting because it leaves more of the root intact, which allows the plant to grow more abundantly the next season. Terrible conditions persist on plantations. Rotten shows an example of the modern sugar-processing industry, in which workers live in small, isolated communities with poor conditions, earning little money. The plantation featured in the documentary is in the Dominican Republic, which accounts for one-sixth of the United States’ sugar imports.

At this point, the raw sugar is shipped to a refinery. American refineries also process raw sugar imported from countries in the Caribbean, Central and South America, and Africa. To make pure granulated cane sugar at the refinery, the raw sugar is dissolved in water and processed to remove any remaining impurities and color. Often, this filtering is done using bone char, a porous, absorbent charcoal made from animal bone, which is why white cane sugar is considered non-vegan. It is centrifuged again to remove the liquid, and the crystals may be ground to create a finer texture. In order to make brown sugar, molasses is added back to this refined sugar. To make confectioners’ sugar (also known as powdered sugar), it is ground especially fine and mixed with cornstarch.

We bought every brand of sugar we could find, both organic and conventional, and examined them side by side. Even to the naked eye, there were marked differences between organic and conventional sugars. The organic products were typically beige or light brown and had a coarser, more irregular texture. The conventional sugars were pure white and uniformly fine. Next, we zeroed in on the two most different brands of sugar: the most even and fine-textured, Domino, and the chunkiest, Wholesome. We also chose one in the middle from Florida Crystals. We took samples of these three to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and looked at them under a high-powered microscope with Mike Tarkanian, a senior lecturer in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. When the sugar was magnified to 40x, the differences were stark. The Wholesome sugar crystals were roughly twice as big as the Domino crystals. They were also more irregular, while Domino’s were more consistent.

Like the Domino sugar crystals themselves, the cookies made with Domino sugar were uniform in appearance and texture. They also had a lighter, airy crumb. Paul Adams, our senior science research editor, explained that finer sugar dissolves more quickly, resulting in a smoother dough that holds air better when it rises, while coarse sugar dissolves more slowly, leaving more undissolved crystals in the dough and interrupting the structure. 

Many of our cookie recipes include a step that manipulates the sugar, such as whisking it with melted butter to help it dissolve or buzzing it in a food processor to make it finer. If the sugar were ground up by a blade, would the differences between products still be clear? We tried Easy Holiday Sugar Cookies to see. We found that the food processor ground the sugar into smaller pieces, which helped the sugar dissolve more. As a result, the differences between products were barely perceptible to our tasters.

We also wanted to look at a recipe that involved creaming butter and sugar in a stand mixer, a common step in some cookie recipes. The cookies made with Wholesome had a slightly more pocked, corrugated surface and a sandy texture, but differences were far less pronounced than those of the cookies we made without a stand mixer. Creaming the ingredients in a machine for a few minutes helps the crystals dissolve. Most cakes are made this way and will also likely show fewer differences, if any, when made with a fine white sugar such as Domino versus chunkier, more beige organic brands.

• Color: Organic/raw sugars may contribute a slightly darker color to whatever you’re making due to the residual molasses. While this may not matter so much when making brownies, for example, it will make a simple syrup that is tinged brown. 

• Moisture: Organic/raw sugars also have a slightly higher moisture content and may make baked goods a little more moist and chewy, similar to the role of brown sugar in cookies. 

• Texture: Depending on how heavily mixed the batter or dough is, coarser sugars will give your baked goods a slightly gritty, grainy texture, which some people enjoy as it adds more character to the treat. 

All our recipes that call for granulated sugar are developed with a conventional granulated white sugar such as Domino unless otherwise specified, so that is what we recommend you use when making them. In many of our recipes, we use methods that solve for variation and irregularities in sugar texture, such as blitzing the sugar in the food processor or whisking it with melted butter to dissolve it. We liked all the sugars in our lineup, so we decided to forgo a ranked chart and instead listed them in order of coarseness, from fine to coarse.