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What is Turbinado Sugar?

Question:
What is turbinado sugar?

Answer:
Turbinado sugar, or raw sugar, gets its fancy name from the technique used to make this sugar product. Turbinado sugar is produced by spinning raw sugar in a centrifuge, or turbine. Refined sugar products, like white and brown sugars, continue through much more processing after this stage is complete.

What is Turbinado Sugar?

Turbinado sugar, or “sugar in the raw”, is the product of pure sugar cane extract that has gone through the first 6 steps of the process to make refined sugars. Once the sugar cane has progressed through the centrifuge or turbine, step #6 in the sugar making process shown below, it is called Turbinado sugar. Here’s the entire sugar making process, courtesy of Imperial sugar. Below that are characteristics specific to this type of sugar.

What is Turbinado Sugar

The Characteristics of Turbinado Sugar

Turbinado sugar looks somewhat like brown sugar, but the crystals are much larger, harder and paler than those of brown sugar.

The taste of turbinado sugar has a light molasses flavor because it is not fully processed and thus retains some of the natural molasses.

Turbinado has slightly less calories than table sugar, but only because it has retained more of the moisture from the sugar cane.

Turbinado sugar can be slightly packed together, more than refined sugar but less than brown sugar.

Using turbinado sugar instead of white sugar in recipes will result in slightly more moisture, color and flavor. For many recipes this is fine, but for more delicate recipes it is unwise to switch sugars.

The shelf life of turbinado sugar is similar to all other types of sugar, see below for more information.

What is Turbinado Sugar

Additional Information

To find the shelf life of turbinado, see our sugar page.

To find a substitute for turbinado, see our brown sugar substitute page.

See our types of brown sugar post for information on different types of brown sugars.

To find out how long other foods are good for, please visit the Dairy, Drinks, Fruits, Grains, Proteins, Vegetables and Other sections of Eat By Date or use the search function below.

What is Turbinado Sugar?

What is Turbinado Sugar?