Molasses Bar Day

If you’ve never had molasses, then National Molasses Bar Day would be the perfect and most apt day to try it! Molasses, or treacle in British English, is essentially a thick sugary syrup made from sugarcane or sugar beets that contains large amounts of calcium, iron and magnesium. Beet molasses is 50% sugar by weight, and sugar is sometimes extracted from beet molasses through molasses desugarization. Cane molasses is more commonly used in cooking.

The word molasses actually comes from the Portuguese word “melaco,” which evolved from the Latin “mel,” meaning “honey.” This sticky and sweet stuff has been used as far back as the 1500s as a sweetener for food. There are a wide variety of uses for it in cooking; for cookies, gingerbread, sauces, dark rye breads, beers such as stouts or porters, and of course, molasses bars. In middle Eastern culture, molasses is produced from dates, grapes and pomegranates. It can also be blended with magnesium chloride and used for de-icing, or as a soil additive to promote microbial activity. On early printing presses, it was mixed with glue to case ink rollers.