There are various tricks and tips to help you bake better muffins. One relates to a topping that can be added before popping them into the oven. To make the goodies look and taste like they came from a professional bakery, try giving them a sprinkling of turbinado sugar the next time you whip up a batch.
This trick is one of Ina Garten’s top tips for texturally perfect blueberry muffins. The kitchen queen also uses it to give her pound cake a crackly edge. Unlike refined white sugar or brown sugar, turbinado sugar features coarse, crunchy grains that won’t fully dissolve atop your muffins. When dusted onto the treats, the sugar crystals retain their crunch while baking, resulting in a sweet, caramelized crust sparkling on the crowns of your muffin tops.
Turbinado sugar can also be used as a garnish for baked goods. But in the case of muffins, it’s best employed as an adornment sprinkled on pre-bake. When the oven heat is applied, the sugar melds with the batter to give you that final, delectable, toffee-esque flavor and crunch that make bakery muffins so appealing.
What is turbinado sugar?
Turbinado is often called “raw” sugar. But the truth is, no sugar product is truly raw, as any type of packaged sugar has been processed to some extent. While turbinado sugar still undergoes a refining process like other sugar products, it is less refined than many of its counterparts.
During the creation of turbinado sugar, it goes through the very first sugar cane pressing only. This creates a syrup that is then boiled. Sugar crystals are formed during the boiling process, which are then spun using turbines (hence the name “turbinado”) to remove any residual liquid. What’s left are the rustic, golden crystals that enable turbinado sugar to give baked goods such a nice crunch.
Because of its more minimalistic processing, turbinado sugar retains some of the sugar cane’s natural molasses, which gives it its blond coloring. This factor also deepens the product’s flavor, lending hints of nuttiness and a toffee taste. These rich flavor notes further enhance baked goods, like muffins, by adding a new taste dimension as well as extra texture.
While turbinado sugar shouldn’t be used as a direct swap for other sugars in most recipes, its unique qualities make it ideal as a finishing sugar and beyond. The chunky crystals are great for rimming drinking glasses, from giving a festive rim to hot chocolate and coffee mugs to sparkling up the rim of a cocktail. The product can also be used as an addition to spice rubs and to crunch up soft-textured foods like oatmeal. Because the grains are so coarse, turbinado sugar is also perfect in cosmetic sugar scrubs to exfoliate skin.
