[Sca-cooks] More Sugar

[Terry Decker]

All of the sugars you are describing are the result of reduced cane juice,
so what you are really asking about are the differences in processing.

Traditionally, sugar has been produced by clarifying cane juice by heating
it with lime and adding albumin (from blood or egg whites), skimming off the
coagulated impurities, reducing the liquid through a series of boilings and
then allowing  the product to crystallize in  a conical clay mold with a
drain hole in the tip so the molasses could drain off.  The sugar was then
"clayed," where wet clay was packed over the top of the conical mold and
left for 8 to 10 days while the moisture trickled through the sugar clearing
the final impurities.  The amount of molasses remaining in the sugar
determined the quality and the color.

Today, clarification is done with only heat and lime, then is boiled down
and centrifuged to remove the molasses.  The process is repeated several
times to extract the greatest amount of sugar.  The sugar is then dissolve,
decolorized  with activated charcoal, and recrystallized.  Brown sugar is
produced by re-intorducing a molasses wash to the refined crystals.

Because truly raw sugar contains to many contaminants to be classed as a
food, food grade "raw" sugar is partially refined with the natural molasses
left in it.  Peloncillo is the closest to truly raw sugar, while the
demerara, turbinado and muscovado variants on the theme of "natural" brown
sugar.  The darker the color, the more glucose and fructose in the mix.

In reality, all of these sugars are about 99 percent sucrose.

Of the generally available sugars in the U.S., peloncillo is the closest in
shape and manufacture to the period sugar cone. Due to the amount of
molasses, it would have been considered poor quality.  The finest quality
sugar would have been white with a slight yellow cast.  While the refined
sugar of today is whiter and has more uniform crystals, there is very little
difference between it and the high quality sugar in period.

Bear




>Some questions i asked, which seem to have gotten lost in all the
>interesting discussion about flour, were about sugar.
>
>I have seen long seen both demerara sugar and turbinado sugar.
>
>Now there's Dark Muscovado sugar, a fairly recent fashionable and
>overpriced sugar. Claims are made for it that it is less refined and
>that it has its own molasses, as it were, still in it, unlike
>commercial light brown and dark brown sugars which are refined white
>sugars with some quantity of molasses added back in. And, yes, i did
>buy a bag of it)
>
>How likely is it that any of these is like period sugar?
>
>Is the Mexican piloncillo, cone sugar, the closest we can get? It
>isn't white...
>
>Is piloncillo different from the cone sugar sold by Revolutionary War
suttlers?
>
>So, what forms of cane sugar would be closest to period cane sugar?
>I've just been using granulated white. Am i way off?
>
>Anahita