Date Sugar

Date sugar is a sweetener made by grinding whole dried dates into a fine granular powder, rather than extracting and refining a syrup or crystalline sugar from them. Because it is made from the whole fruit, date sugar retains the fiber, vitamins and minerals naturally present in dates, unlike more refined sweeteners, though this also means it does not dissolve well in liquids the way ordinary sugar does. It is used as a roughly one-to-one substitute for granulated sugar in baking and granola and other dry or baked applications, valued particularly in natural foods cooking for its unrefined origin and caramel-like flavor.