How To Soften Brown Sugar Without a Microwave
We've all been there. It's 9 o'clock at night, dinner is over, and suddenly you and your loved ones are craving cookies. All eyes turn to you and you stand up--ready to do the dirty deed--and as you march into the kitchen, confident that you can churn out cookies lickety split, you grab a box of brown sugar only to discover...
...that you can't make cookies with it, but you can build a house with it. It's as hard as a brick.
Many of you who have microwaves (I don't have one (see here)) know the simple solution: you can nuke it next to a dish of water, or with a damp paper towel on it, 30 seconds at a time until it's soft. That wasn't an option for me.
So I turned to Twitter: I polled the Twitterverse, "How do I soften brown sugar without a microwave?"
The first suggestion, which I tried, was to put the brown sugar in a food processor:
The sound that this made was deeply unpleasant, to say the least. And while it sanded a little of the sugar at the bottom, the brick remained almost entirely intact. I decided to add a splash of hot water to see if that'd help things along....
But that just created a pool of brown water at the bottom of my food processor.
I was ready for more suggestions, but most of them were suggestions for how to soften the sugar overnight: "put it in a container with a slice of bread" was a popular one. But I needed softened sugar right now!
Finally, I took it upon myself to heat the regular old oven (350 degrees) and to lay a damp paper on the brown sugar before it went in:
I monitored things carefully through the oven window and then got nervous about having a paper product in a hot oven; so I removed the paper towel and added a splash of hot water to the bottom of the pan.
This did the trick:
As you can see, the sugar softened to the point where I could mash it easily with a fork. (It took just a few minutes.)
So the answer to the question "how do you soften brown sugar without a microwave?" is: in the oven with a splash of hot water.
You're welcome!
