In article >, "Dora" > wrote:
>James Silverton wrote:
>>
>> Incidentally, perhaps I should mention again that traditional "brown
>> sugar" that has become caked or hard can be easily softened for
>> cooking purposes by nuking for a few seconds. This is a lot less
>> messy than hitting it with a mallet :-)
>
>Brown sugar doesn't cake if you prevent it from the time you open a
>new box. I find it easy to put a rubber band around the plastic bag
>of sugar then put the bag inside a Ziploc each time I use it. It
>never cakes.

G'day Dora,

When did you come back? I haven't seen you here in RFC for ages (I
don't follow all threads though, so may well have missed you).
In fact, last I heard you were just out of hospital and seriously
deprived of independence back in the middle of last year!
Nice to see you here again.

Concerning brown sugar, here in Oz we seem to have a product referred
to as "soft brown sugar" which has a fine grain and a hint of
moistness. I haven't had it go solid on me; but I usually only buy
500g at a time and store it in a decent lidded plastic container.

Back in the days of bagged raw sugar from our mills, it was often
produced faster than it could be shipped, which meant enormous stacks
of bagged sugar held at the mills for quite a long time (and during
the wet season too!). This led to many bags being as hard as rocks by
the time the stacks had to be broken down for shipment. At 160 lb
each, the damn things were not only hard to handle but potentially
dangerous if allowed to "ski" down the slope of the breaking stack!

Cheers, Phred.

--
LID