Today sugar is used everywhere, although many scientific papers have been written about its dangers. To minimize the negative effects it has on the body, doctors and nutritionists recommend replacing the white product with a brown one. The latter is considered less harmful, since more nutrients are retained during its production.
How brown cane sugar is made
Brown cane sugar began to be produced as early as the 3rd century BC, using the juice of sugar cane, a perennial herb belonging to the cereal family. Today, this product is also made from cane, but more modern methods are used for this.
To produce really high-quality sugar, cane is grown in subtropical and tropical regions, which are dominated by a warm climate with a lot of rainfall during the growing season. After harvesting, the cane is cleaned, crushed and poured with water, preparing a mushy mixture. Then the cane gruel is heated and squeezed thoroughly, thereby extracting the cane juice. A syrup is then prepared from this product and placed in a vacuum machine along with a small amount of sucrose to obtain homogeneous crystals. The latter are dried with a stream of hot and cold air.
To obtain friable cane sugar, the crystals are centrifuged, and to obtain a lumpy product, the crystallized mass is simply split in a special machine. After that, the sugar undergoes a final quality control for compliance with international standards, including taste and color, and then is weighed and packaged in packages.
To obtain white cane sugar, the unrefined brown product is further refined using charcoal filters. This is why it retains far fewer nutrients and is considered to be more harmful to health.
How brown beet sugar is made
Brown beet sugar is also an unrefined product, since it is not purified from molasses - plant sap that envelops crystals and gives the product its characteristic brown color. For the production of such sugar, sugar beets are used, which are first thoroughly cleaned of impurities and foreign objects, then washed, weighed and crushed into shavings on special equipment.
After that, the shavings enter a diffusion unit, where sugar juice is extracted from it. This product is also purified from impurities and dyes and filtered in several stages. The filtered syrup is boiled down in a vacuum apparatus until crystals are obtained, which are then crushed using a centrifuge. The resulting brown granulated sugar is packaged and sold. And the rest of the crystals undergoes refining and bleaching, resulting in the usual white granulated sugar.
