way back when, i teased you with a promise of sugar taste tests. today, i finally did it. it was quite the undertaking but i had all the equipment necessary. let me elaborate… for a proper test, one must have standards. a scale, properly weighed sugar, properly weighed liquids, and no mixing of one liquid into another. there are, of course, certain things that cannot be controlled: for example, you have to drink the liquids in a certain order (thus potentially biasing the subsequent liquids).

i started by tareing a small dish on my salter food scale and then measuring out 6 grams of sugar into each of the four dishes, being careful to tare each dish. next, i grabbed my camera and flash for some picture action. this was probably the most labor intensive part of the test as i was trying out my flash and different lenses. the pictures came out ok – more on that below.

next, i needed a relatively benign tea for my test. i didn’t feel like using hot water seeing as i rarely drink hot water with sugar and i thought the lavender tea from the first test was a bit too aromatic. i didn’t have any lipton on hand, so i made do with a standard chinese black tea (caffeine-free). the little packet doesn’t even say if the darn thing is black pekoe or not. it is truly an anonymous tea. perfect placebo tea! (can placebo be an adjective? anyway…) the tea came in individual tea bags but yet again i needed to adhere to standards so i cut open a bunch of sachets and brewed 36 ounces of tea in a bodum tea pot. the tea was so finely ground that it leaked out of the tea infuser so once the tea was brewed, i poured it into my ingenuitea infuser which has a finer mesh strainer. since i am unable to finely control the liquid throughput of this infuser, i had to transfer the liquid again to a frothing pitcher (i picked the wrong one – the damn thing leaked down the side!).

with my four sugars in 4 different tea cups, i tared each cup to zero and then added 155 grams of tea. surprisingly, i only dripped one drop onto the scale from my faulty pitcher so standards relatively intact on that count. now i just had to make sure that i had a stir spoon for each tea and some kind of water/bread chaser for cleansing the palate.

i took pictures of all 4 teas both before and after stirring. stirring didn’t change the color, but there was definitely a color difference among the teas. i anticipated the demarara to be the least potent and the muscovado to be the most potent with la perruche coming in second and the palm sugar in third place. lined up in this fashion, the demarara and la perruche didn’t change the tea color from its reddish brown hue. the palm sugar turned the tea a darker red-brown and the muscovado turned the tea dark brown with almost no trace of the red left.

i know enough about coffee cupping and food tasting to know that you should both smell and taste the sample. the demarara smelled only like tea. the la perruche had a slightly sweeter aroma but barely noticeable on repeated sniffs. the palm sugar definitely smelled sugary sweet and the muscovado smelled like, no surprise here, molasses.

finally, the taste test! the demarara tasted like standard sugar – no particular essence (true taste testers would skewer me for this taste laziness, i’m sure). i cleansed my palette with fresh baked sourdough bread – not exactly the most benign food, but very tasty so who cares! the la perruche tasted nuttier and had a fuller flavor. it was slightly sweeter than the demarara and i liked it better. the palm sugar tasted sour and exactly like the sugar smells. it almost lacked in a particularly sweet flavor or perhaps the off-putting taste and smell distracted me from its sweetness. the muscovado tasted like, no surprise here, molasses. it was actually not as sweet as i expected. clearly not as sweet as brown sugar, but brown sugar wasn’t part of today’s experiment. perhaps another time…

so now, here i am, on my computer, surrounded by half-drunk cups of tea with the rest sitting in the frothing pitcher. thank goodness the tea is caffeine-free. is 36 ounces of tea too much for a little asian?

clockwise, from top left: palm sugar, la perruche, demarara, muscovado

left to right: demarara, la perruche, palm sugar, muscovado