Demerara sugar best for toppings

Q. What is demerara sugar, and what can I use as a substitute?

A: Demerara sugar is a type of semi-unrefined sugar named after the Demerara River in Guyana. A Dutch colony on the river's banks, also called Demerara, was the site of one of South America's earliest sugarcane works.

Sugar must be laboriously extracted from plants — either sugarcane or beets.

Sugarcane is a tall, fat grass whose stalks are woody and jointed like bamboo. Once harvested, the cane is crushed and the "juice" is subjected to a battery of refining operations to remove impurities before being crystallized into white sugar.

The byproduct of this process is blackstrap molasses, and, in fact, refining can be seen as a gradual separation of white sugar from black molasses.

Now, if sugar is crystallized before all the impurities are removed, the result is a nonwhite sugar that can range from dark brown to light tan. Demerara is one of these sugars.

Pauline McKee, marketing director for Wholesome Sweeteners, makers of natural and organic sugar-cane products, explained that demerara crystals are bigger than those of granulated white sugar, and thus "their best application is as a crunchy topping."

In the United States, demerara sugar is often known as turbinado sugar. (The name derives from the turbine in which the sugar is processed.) Wholesome Sweeteners makes an organic turbinado sugar from cane grown in Brazil. The country's best-known turbinado sugar is Sugar in the Raw, made from Hawaiian cane, which is widely available.

You're probably wondering: What about good old supermarket brown sugar? It turns out that this is nothing more than granulated white sugar to which molasses has been added back, a little bit more to the dark brown sugar, a little bit less to the light brown.