Brown Sugar for Chocolate Chip Cookies

mia45943

I am going to try my hand at baking a batch of chocolate chip cookies. I have never made cookies before, so this will be a learning experience and somewhat of an adventure. I am going to start with a simple recipe, what may be considered a standard, the Toll House recipe.

The recipe calls for brown sugar, and at the supermarket last night I saw a few types of brown sugar: dark brown, light brown, some just described as brown, etc. What does brown sugar bring to the recipe, and how do the different shades of brown sugar affect the result?

Also, all the recipes I've looked at call for "packed" brown sugar. How much do I pack it? The degree of packing would change the amount of brown sugar in the mixture, which would, I imagine, change the result. Are there some "packing" guidelines?

Is there a standard for the various brown sugars, or do different brands of dark have different amounts of molasses in them (it's molasses that make the sugar brown, yes), so that one brand of dark may not be the same as another? And this, then, goes back to the question, "what does brown sugar bring to the recipe?"

goldfinches

From the online video here A timeless discovery: Nestlé Toll House Chocolate Chip Cookies (nestle.com) packed meaning "you fill your measuring cup and then press down gently". Having looked at the brown sugar visible on the counter in the video if you are in the UK I think soft brown sugar is what you need. 
To answer your questions about brown sugar this is a good explanation of the differences in flavours and usage Sugar - BBC Good Food and here is some more technical information that you may find interesting brown-sugars.pdf (britishsugar.co.uk)

I am a keen home baker and find it useful to keep a recipe notebook where I list the ingredients and where the recipe came from and then my opinion of the results and any thoughts I have on what I would do differently if I repeated the recipe again. I find this very helpful a few months later and also scribble a mark out of ten in the margin of the recipe book so that when I'm considering what to make next I'm not relying on my faulty memory. Other people's comments can also be helpful and so I use online sites that have very active sections for these as well.

ETA I recently bought an oven thermometer which has helped me to achieve better results as my oven controls have proved to be very inaccurate.

Wraithlady

I assume it's an American recipe - you can probably find a conversion to UK weights online as we don't use 'cups' very much as a measure. 

As to the sugar, I wouldn't use dark brown sugar personally but it should be ok with pretty much any type of sugar - even bog-standard granulated.

PipneyJane

Hi @mia45943.  May I second what was said in @goldfinches post?  I do quite a bit of baking from American recipes and would use soft, dark brown sugar.   (NB:  I usually buy L!dl’s.  It’s cheap at £1.55/kg and sold in 1kg bags.)

On the “packed” thing:  if you think logically, there’s a good reason why the Toll House recipe says “packed”.  If you are filling a cup measure with soft, dark brown sugar there are bound to be air gaps, unless you press it in with your spoon.

Finally, regarding cup measures:  while American measuring cups are slightly smaller than British (due to their pint being 16 fl oz, while ours is 20), it makes no difference to the recipe so long as you consistently use only British measuring cups or only American measuring cups while measuring out your ingredients.  Just don’t mix between the two.  (I have sets of both.)

Off the top of my head, I can’t remember how butter is measured for the Toll House recipe.  If it quotes “a stick” then that’s 113g, which is the equivalent of 1/2 cup of butter.    If it talks in tablespoons, there is 8 tablespoons to a stick so I’d work with a tablespoon equalling 15g and multiplying it up from there.

HTH

Pip

goldfinches

Hello again, I was just reading this recipe Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe (goodhousekeeping.com)
and found this paragraph in the notes below it which I'm copying and pasting here in case anyone finds it helpful.

How do different types of sugar alter your cookies?

White sugars have less leavening power than brown sugars, and so they spread quickly rather than rise, resulting in a thinner and crispier cookie. Since brown sugars contain molasses, adding them to your dough will result in a chewier and more cake like cookie. Brown sugars will also add a caramel flavour to any dough, that adding a white sugar would lack.

Mrs_Salad_Dodger

Thanks for that goldfinches 👏 I have made a note of that very useful info.
MrsSD