Spice market: Sweet surrender | South China Morning Post

If you were to ask the average person whether sugar was a spice, they'd probably say no.

I googled "Is sugar a spice?" and the results that came up were illogical: "No, sugar is an ingredient" (as if other spices are not!); "Sweet is not a flavour" (just plain wrong); and "Sugar is not a spice because it is not grown as a plant. Sugar is simply glucose." The latter implies sugar springs from nothingness, when actually, it can be processed from many different plants.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines spices as "strongly flavoured or aromatic substances of vegetable origin obtained from tropical plants". Sugar has a strong flavour, is of vegetable origin and can be made from tropical plants.

Sounds like a spice to me.

If you want to argue otherwise because it's usually used in large quantities, I'd ask; when has ubiquity changed the definition of something?

White sugar is the most refined variety and, therefore, has the least character - it just adds sweetness (although there's nothing wrong with that!). It's made by extracting the juice out of a plant (such as sugar cane or sugar beets), boiling it to evaporate the liquid, then refining it to remove the impurities that colour it and affect the flavour.

Less refined sugars, such as gula Melaka, jaggery, gur, piloncillo and muscovado, have a rich complexity that balances the sweetness. When they're made by cooking the syrup over a wood fire, these sugars can also have a pleasant, smoky flavour. These varieties tend to be moister than white sugars, and can be lumpy and hard; sometimes you need to chop the sugar with a knife.

I use refined white sugar when I just want sweetness, such as in cakes, pies and jams. But when I want flavour, and when the darker colour doesn't matter, I reach for gula Melaka, muscovado and jaggery, all of which are easy to find in Hong Kong.

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