'wet' in cooking means 'strictly water only,' right, deep-frying is a 'dry' cooking method. yet in baking, granulated sugar is considered a 'wet' ingredient. such is life in this fucked-up topsy-turvy world.
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in reply to @bruno's post:
I’ve long harboured a suspicion that baking and cooking, though sometimes confused by outsiders, are in fact radically different activities.
I think the categories are "dry" and "not dry". Sugar is "wet" because if you heat it up, it becomes a liquid, and sugar is extremely hygroscopic so it's probably grabbing water from the atmosphere for the hell of it.
Whereas something like searing is a dry cooking method, because you want to use the Maillard reaction for browning (and tasty crust) and that only occurs at 140-165C, well past the boiling point of water. So the presence of water inhibits browning.
So the distinction is "water is to be avoided here" and "water is fine here."
Sugar is "wet" because if you heat it up, it becomes a liquid
Sugar is frequently "wet" in baking simply because you add it to the wet ingredients instead of the dry ingredients. This has nothing to do with the properties of sugar when heated, especially since the wet and dry are combined before heat comes into it. Instead, adding sugar into the wet ingredients before the wet and dry are combined inhibits the gluten formation. Adding the sugar to the dry ingredients when the recipe calls for adding it to the wet will result in a denser and chewier product than expected.
That said, sugar isn't universally "wet", even in baking. There are even some recipes where the sugar is divided between the wet and the dry ingredients to make it sweeter while inhibiting gluten formation a specific amount.
sugar also in my mind is a wet ingredient because i've often seen it referred to in the baking world as "evaporated cane juice", meaning that the truth of the material is a wet one, and it's crystalline form is but a momentary dalliance for the sake of storage and transport
