Last week I went to make my homemade granola bars only to find the brown sugar as hard as a brick. Determined to not waste the brown sugar, I researched how to soften it! It is actually very easy to soften brown sugar in the microwave.
Place a clump of brown sugar in a microwave safe bowl. Dampen a paper towel with water. Place the damp paper towel over the brown sugar.
Cover the bowl with a plate or a lid and microwave for 30 seconds. Check to see if the brown sugar has softened. If it is still hard, microwave for another 30 seconds. With this large chunk of brown sugar, it took two sessions.
Do you have a tip for softening brown sugar? How do you keep brown sugar from hardening in the first place?
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Renae is a married working mom of two handsome boys. She works as a registered dental hygienist by day and blogs here at How to Have it All by night. She enjoys cooking from scratch, working in her vegetable garden and functional training.
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I always leave my brown sugar in the bag it comes in, roll it down and chip-clip it, then I put the whole thing in a Tupperware container. My brown sugar never gets hard, I think it’s all about being as air-tight as possible.
If you put a heel of bread into your container of brown sugar and leave it there, after a day it will transfer the moisture of the bread to the brown sugar and you will have soft brown sugar! You can keep the bread heel in there for a week or two and then just stick in another one when you notice it’s too stiff.
I used to put mine in the freezer, which works well, but lately I have found that with the plastic packages, I can simply keep them tightly closed and keep them in the refrigerator bin. I tried the microwave method before reading this and agree that it does work, but the unused portion will become hard again very quickly. Try to break off a chunk and use microwave method. My grandmother used the previously mentioned slice of bread technique as well as putting a slice of apple in the bag.
Don’t leave the apple in the bag once the sugar softens!