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Never thought about it, lol! Subjectively, I taste white sugar as sweeter & not as complex. It'll be interesting to see if someone comes up with some definitive facts on this.
White sugar has 16 calories per teaspoon, brown sugar has 11. For the same quantities, white sugar contains more actual sugar and hence more sweetness.
Sweetness is measured on the Brix Scale using sucrose as a standard with a Brix Number of 1. If something is said to be 12 times sweeter than sugar it would have a Brix Number of 12. But when we are comparing two samples of the same substance we don't need to worry about that. All we need to know is the quantity of sugar we're adding.
Quote:
Originally Posted by OpenD
White sugar has 16 calories per teaspoon, brown sugar has 11. For the same quantities, white sugar contains more actual sugar and hence more sweetness.
Since we measure by volume in this country we can simply use the standards supplied. If brown sugar has 11 calories per tsp and white sugar has 16 calories then white sugar is 16/11 sweeter than brown. This would only apply to the stated sample and doesn't account for the difference between light and dark brown sugar but we can say that the light brown is sweeter because the refinery adds less molasses leaving a higher percentage of sucrose. Brown sugar is simply refined white sugar with molasses added.
It is possible to measure the sweetness. Different percentage of sucrose don't have just different levels of sweetness; they have different refractive indices. Therefore, just take the sample amounts of sugar and dissolve them in the same quantity of distilled water. Take a reading with a refractometer, the kind you use to measure sweetness in fruits, beer, wine, etc.
Here's an inexpensive one. But please note that it's designed to measure only sugar, not artificial sweeteners as the highest Brix number it measures is 32. Artificial sweeteners may have much higher numbers.
Location: South Austin near Wm Cannon and South First
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I can eat brown sugar right out of the bag. I cannot do the same with white sugar.
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