Pantry Lovers: How to Make Your Own Brown Sugar and Condensed Milk From Scratch

Pantry Lovers Series – Make it from scratch

In a break from banging on about the joys of making your own yoghurt or chai or crackers or puddings, I want to write you a series revering the basics. The very basics.

Things you wouldn’t usually ever consider making yourself because they are just an ingredient.

Cue the inevitable: why on earth would you ever bother making your own brown sugar, breadcrumbs, pasta or vanilla extract? Because we CAN! Because it’s fun (I mean sure, maybe we should get out more.) As hobbies go, baking has pretty good social capital and brewing your own beer has actual street cred, but I’m here to champion the unsung hero, the person spending their time making their own condensed milk.

Of course we can buy it. We can buy any of it. But making it ourselves takes us out of the supermarket fiasco for a minute, it’s so interesting, and it makes your pantry, kitchen and fridge a place of creation, not just consumption. Cool, right?!

A Word On Pantries

There is often a young relative of mine standing in the doorway of the farmhouse pantry complaining that there is nothing to eat. There’s no food in here, Mum. That’s never true, by the way. They are obviously looking for ready-to-eat, and ingredients alone don’t tend to satisfy at mid-afternoon, even if there’s yummy nuts and organic dried fruit back there. The popcorn needs to be popped. The dates blitzed into bliss balls and the chocolate chips baked into biscuits. (Put down the jar of chocolate chips, honey.)

Pantries are places of magic waiting to happen. What a blessing against hunger they are, if you have a pantry at all you’re lucky, and if it has food in it we can count ourselves as fortunate and favoured.

Also while you wait for the magic to happen if you look hard enough you will definitely find my secret stash of good chocolate.

Brown Sugar

The first time I learnt I could make my own brown sugar my mind was a bit blown. What? It’s white sugar with molasses added back in? So why don’t we just use white sugar and molasses in the recipe then? Feel free to try that if you’re into experimentation (I am), but turns out, it’s really not the same. Particularly in baked goods, the way the butter interacts with different sugars is elemental. Butter creamed with brown sugar, and butter creamed with white sugar with molasses added after equals very different results. It’s dead easy to make your own brown sugar if you’ve run out, and if you happen to conveniently have white sugar and molasses on hand.

Makes 1 cup

Ingredients

220 g (1 cup) white sugar
1 tablespoon molasses

For a darker brown sugar:
220 g (1 cup) white sugar
2 tablespoons molasses

Method
Put the sugar in a bowl and drizzle the molasses over the top. With your fingers (it won’t work with a fork) rub the molasses into the sugar. I know it’s messy but bear with me – it’s a little bit of magic. Keep rubbing, it’ll look like white sugar and clumps of molasses until it magically turns into brown sugar! There you have it. You’re a wizard. I’ll be honest, sugar technically lasts forever but home-made brown sugar doesn’t store beautifully for that long; it tends to go hard and lumpy. Apparently, you can mitigate this by sticking a slice of white bread into your sugar jar, which absorbs the moisture and stops it clumping. Or you can just make as much as you need for 2–3 weeks.

Condensed Milk

You can totally make your own condensed milk. This is useful to know if you are, you know, in a cabin in the middle of nowhere with a stove and sugar and milk and a desire to make no-churn ice cream. Because that scenario sounds likely. Or maybe you have a hankering for caramel. Or so you can eat it with a spoon. Or just make it for the joy of demonstrating that something you always bought in a can can be made from scratch. For fun. If that’s your kind of thing. (Totally my kind of thing.)
I make my own condensed milk because I’m a mad keen from-scratch cook who really likes making slices, and many of my slice recipes have condensed milk in them.
Also MAGIC and WIZARDRY. You get it.

Makes 250 ml (1 cup), approx. equivalent to 1 x 400 g (14 oz) tin.
Ingredients
500 ml (2 cups) full-cream milk
1 cup (220g) white sugar

Method
Mix the ingredients together in a heavy-bottomed saucepan and heat over a low heat, stirring until the sugar dissolves.
Once the sugar is fully dissolved, simmer over a very low heat for approximately 40 minutes, stirring occasionally. It’s done when it has halved in volume from the start.
Store in the fridge for up to 1 month.

Recipes adapted from Fiona Weir’s book “From Scratch” published by Hardie Grant 2022, photography by Alan Benson