EN:Sugar

Sugar: A Natural Sweetener and Its Production

Sugar is a natural sweetener made from sugar beet or sugar cane and is an important food ingredient.

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🍴 confectionery📅 year-round🌍 Sugar is produced from sugar beet and sugar cane grown in different parts of the world.

Nutrition per 100 g

Calories	387 kcal
Protein	0 g
Fat	0 g
Carbohydrates	100 g
Fiber	0 g

Vitamins

none

Minerals

none

GI index

65

🍳 Culinary uses

Sugar is used as a sweetener in drinks, baking and cooking, giving foods a sweet taste.

🔍 How to choose

Good-quality sugar should be white and free from impurities.

📦 Storage

Store in a cool, dry place, ideally in a sealed container.

🔄 Substitutes

Sugar can be replaced with artificial sweeteners or honey.

💚 Health benefits

Sugar provides readily available energy, but excessive consumption can contribute to health problems.

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Sugar is a natural sweetener and an edible substance generally referred to more precisely as table sugar. The Czech word cukr entered Czech through German Zucker and ultimately derives from Arabic sukkar. Chemically, table sugar is sucrose.

It is produced as a food ingredient in sugar factories, chiefly from sugar cane or sugar beet, and marketed as white or raw sugar (brown sugar), either loose as crystals or powder, or pressed into solid forms such as sugarloaves or cubes. Global sugar production is around 160 million tonnes per year, making sugar an economically important commodity.

The plural term “sugars” is sometimes used to refer to all carbohydrates, of which table sugar is one.

Production

Sucrose occurs in many plants, which produce it as an energy reserve. The most economically important sources are sugar beet, originating in Europe, and tropical sugar cane from the Caribbean.

Beet sugar

To produce sugar from sugar beet, the harvested beets are first washed and cleaned, cut into thin strips called cossettes and placed in diffusers, where the sugar is extracted with water at different temperatures. The spent beet pulp is then used as livestock feed.

The extracted sugar juice is purified, filtered and clarified by adding lime and treating it with carbon dioxide in a carbonation tank. This neutralizes plant acids and precipitates impurities, which are then removed by straining and filtration in a filter press. The process is repeated two or three times. The juice is then boiled down and evaporated under reduced pressure, and the resulting thick juice is filtered again. Crystallization takes place gradually in a vacuum pan after a small amount of crystalline sugar is added to seed the process. Once crystallized, the sugar mass is centrifuged and washed to remove liquid impurities, or molasses, remaining from the original juice. The resulting moist sugar crystals are dried—older methods instead filled the mass into molds—then passed through sieves and separated by crystal size.

By contrast, the residual sugar product known as molasses contains about 40 % non-crystallizable sugars and has an unpleasant smell. It is used to produce alcohol or yeast, livestock feed and other products.

Cane sugar

Sugar-cane processing is similar but simpler because cane contains fewer impurities. Smaller quantities of sugar have also been produced from dates, sorghum, maple and other plants.

Other sources

Sugar production is relatively complex and equipment-intensive. Its development was therefore greatly aided by advances in mechanical engineering, and the Czech lands held an important position in both fields during the 19th and 20th centuries.

Reference

This article uses text from the Sugar article on Czech Wikipedia.