Sugar For Chocolate Chip Cookies

Our answer

Nigella's Chocolate Chip Cookies (from KITCHEN) are made with a combination of caster (superfine) sugar and soft light brown sugar. The reason a combination is used is as the caster sugar helps to give a crisp crust to the cookies and the soft brown sugar helps to give them a soft interior.

Unfortunately demerara sugar (turbinado sugar/sugar in the raw) is not really suitable for the cookies. This type of sugar is an unrefined sugar but it usually has fairly large, crunchy crystals. The problem is that the crystals of the sugar don't dissolve that well and so the cookie dough will have sugar grains in it, which will affect the finished texture of the baked cookies. If you can't get soft light brown sugar then you can replace it with soft dark brown sugar or light or dark muscovado sugar. If none of these are available then we suggest using 125g of extra caster sugar plus 2 teaspoons of treacle or molasses instead (a total of 275g caster sugar plus 2 teaspoons treacle).