Can i substitute sorghum for maple syrup

Store cane sugar in an airtight, dry container in a cool place. Cane sugar will last years if stored well. This sugar is made from the syrup of coconut palms and is less refined than white sugar. The moisture is removed from the sap, leaving crystals of coconut sugar.

This sugar is popular in regions with coconuts but has found a bigger market in the United States. Coconut sugar is not the same as palm sugar made from a different variety of palm. Because of the limited use of sweeteners in my kitchen, I prefer to stick to muscovado and cane sugar for similar sweeteners. However, you can use coconut sugar in place of traditional white sugar and even brown sugar.

Look for pure coconut sugar. Some brands cut their coconut sugar with cane sugar. Also known as powdered sugar, this sweetener is used in many baking items that require a glaze or frosting. Confectioners sugar dissolves easily, making it the perfect baking companion. For longer storage of confectioners sugar, a bit of cornstarch is used to keep it from clumping. Store confectioners sugar in an airtight container and if clumps form, sift before using.

Of all the sweeteners on this page, honey and maple syrup are my two go-to sweeteners. The flavor of honey is based on the type of environment and flowers the bees live near. Each factor plays a role in the different flavors of the honey whereas store-bought, clover honey has a mild, predictable flavor. Conversely, molasses is the by-product of processing sugar cane into sugar. Sugar cane is stripped of its leaves and the juice is extracted from the cane by crushing or mashing.

The juice is then boiled to concentrate it, which produces crystallization of the sugar. Sorghum tends to have a thinner consistency than molasses, along with a slightly more sour taste. Additionally, molasses comes in multiple varieties. Fructose will not fully crystallize in the presence of sucrose and glucose.

So, to recap, you have your sugar, which you boil down to bring to a liquid state, where it will stay for good scientific reasons. And, now you have golden syrup aka light treacle, as our English friends might call it.

Harry Potter would tell you to make a treacle tart for one! Golden Syrup is also an excellent substitute for corn syrup or honey. Basically, anything you need to sweeten without putting too much extra flavor into. The stalks, like the sugarcane plant, are cut down and the juices squeezed out of them.

This juice is then cooked and filtered. Sorghum butter is a must! Whip the two up together and spread it on fresh biscuits or a warm, crusty square of cornbread. Glazes for ham, sweet potatoes, carrots. Anything sweet or savory with ginger. Drizzle on toast and ice cream. Alongside a country road in rural Kentucky, it's pretty common to see rows of corn stretching all the way to the horizon, but all of those green stalks might not actually be corn plants.

On closer inspection, you wouldn't see any ears, and the head of the plant looks a little bit more like wheat than corn [source: In the Field ]. What you're probably looking at is sweet sorghum. The sorghum plant is actually a grass that's native to Egypt and spread throughout the rest of Africa [source: Oklahoma 4H ]. Farmers in the U. Sorghum is a grain, and sweet sorghum is a specific variety selected for its higher sugar content [source: Food and Agriculture Organization ].

What makes sweet sorghum especially attractive to farmers is its drought resistance. It doesn't require a lot of water, so it's an ideal crop for areas that don't see a lot of rainfall, like parts of China and Africa as well as in the U. Processed syrup from the sorghum plant is amber in color and looks a lot like maple syrup [source: Mallon ]. In fact, you can basically treat it like maple syrup in recipes, and some folks even use it to top their pancakes. Farmers also mix the leavings from making sorghum syrup into animal feed, but food for people and animals isn't the main use for sweet sorghum.

It's become a cash crop since researchers discovered that we can use sorghum syrup to produce biofuels. As the U. Sweet sorghum farming used to take place mainly in the southeast United States, but now farmers in the Corn Belt are jumping on the sorghum train as droughts destroy their corn crops. Sweet sorghum's multiple uses -- as food and fuel -- make it an attractive alternative to corn for many farmers [source: Baragona].

Sweet sorghum is just one type of sorghum plant, and the higher sugar content is what distinguishes it from other types of sorghum. There are several varieties of sweet sorghum, and farmers breed these specifically for their sweetness [source: Bitzer ]. Sorghum syrup producers crush the stalk to extract the sweet juice, just like sugar cane.

After extracting the juice, they cook it down to create the sorghum syrup -- also called sorghum molasses -- that stocks store shelves [source: UGA Extension ]. You can use sorghum syrup to replace other liquid sweeteners, like honey, molasses, maple syrup or even white sugar in recipes, though on its own sorghum syrup is more like maple syrup than any of these other sweeteners. The trick to substituting sorghum syrup for other sweeteners is knowing what ratio to use.

You can substitute sorghum syrup in place of maple syrup or corn syrup in recipes using a one-to-one ratio, but for other sweeteners, you may need to adjust your recipe slightly. Sorghum syrup is also is more nutritious than some other more refined sweeteners. We've been cooking with sorghum syrup for hundreds of years, but what's really made this crop catch on in recent years is its potential as a biofuel to replace or supplement petroleum in our fuel supply.