Tips
  • Demerara is particularly suitable for American-style desserts, like cheesecake, cookies, and pumpkin pie.
  • A sprinkling of demerara on top of crème brûlée, crema catalana or oven-baked puddings before browning will ensure a crisp sugar crust. 
  • The colour and texture of demerara will give a quite different flavour to certain kinds of cake batter, pastry and gingerbread. 
  • Its highly unique taste counterbalances the sourness of fruits like apples and rhubarb and enhances their flavour.
  • Demerara adds a more exotic note to dishes combining sweet and savoury ingredients.

A special role for each type of sugar


Cassonade or demerara

Cassonade - also known as demerara - is granulated brown sugar obtained by boiling sugar cane juice. Contrary to popular belief, it contains less sucrose (95%) than white sugar (99,9%).
The remaining 5% is made up of mineral salts and organic matter such as gum and wax, which gives the sugar its colour and characteristic flavours of vanilla and rum.
From casson to cassonade

Cassonade is derived from the word casson, which in turn comes from the French verb casser, to break. In sixteenth-century French, casson was a crumbly type of sugar that was easy to break and reduced to powder.

Use it for
  • exotic recipes such as pineapple flambé, pineapple in wine or en papillotes with rum, tropical fruit salad, banana mousse and punch, to give them an even more intense flavour of the Caribbean.
  • typically British “comfort food” eaten to counteract the effects of the weather, such as fruit crumbles, puddings, cakes and pies. It is also the ideal sugar for the chutneys and pickles so popular in the U.K.