I am currently outside of the United States and I haven't been able to find granulated sugar, all I've been able to find is what seems to be raw sugar and powdered sugar. Would either of these work to make chocolate chip/sugar cookies?
2 Answers
Granulated sugar is 100% sucrose with the molasses removed. Raw sugar on the other hand is refined sucrose with its natural molasses. The answer is yes, you can use them but you might need a bit of tweaking within the recipe. If your raw sugar looks a bit more like brown sugar then your chocolate chip cookies would come out more chewy (not that its a bad thing) because of the molasses in them, whereas granulated sugar would yield a crumb that is more crisp.
P.S. Its alright to use powdered sugar. Some recipes even call for it when baking cookies. However, when substituting granulated sugar to powdered sugar, i recommend that you use a scale since powdered sugar holds so much air when packing into a cup measurement. Measure 7 oz of powdered sugar per 1 cup of granulated sugar.
The brand name and type of your "raw sugar" can make some difference here. Using "Sugar in the Raw" (Turbinado sugar) would be similiar to using a light brown sugar, while using something that's legitimately less processed like Sucanat would yield a result more akin to a dark brown sugar due to the much higher molasses content. This is perfect if you're doing a "chewy" cookie recipe that uses a combination of light brown sugar and granulated white sugar.
Alton Brown's "The Chewy" comes to mind. Treat the raw sugar exactly like the light brown sugar in his recipe, and powdered sugar exactly like granulated (he measures the sugar by ounce so you don't have to worry about volume. No conversions needed.)
If you choose to use a different recipe, then follow Reca's advice for the conversions. And if you're using a darker raw sugar like Sucanat, you might want to up the ratio of powdered to raw sugar a bit.
