Sugar

Sugars (clockwise from top-left): white refined, unrefined, unprocessed cane and brown

Sugar is the generic name for sweet-tasting, soluble carbohydrates, many of which are used in food. Simple sugars, also called monosaccharides, include glucose, fructose, and galactose. Compound sugars, also called disaccharides or double sugars, are molecules made of two bonded monosaccharides; common examples are sucrose, lactose, and maltose. White sugar is a refined form of sucrose. In the body, compound sugars are hydrolysed into simple sugars.

Uses

Some food preservation processes that involve sugaring. Preserving fruit by turning it into jam, for instance, includes sugaring to prevent bacteria re-growth.

Sucrose is used in prepared foods (such as cookies and cakes), is sometimes added to commercially available processed food and beverages, and may be used as a sweetener for foods and beverages.

Mixing sugar with sodium chlorate and sulfuric acid generates an exothermic chemical reaction that can be used to start fires.

Production

Plants such as sugar cane and sugar beet are harvested, cleaned, pulped and crushed to extract as much of the juice as possible, it is then sulfutationed, and mixed with lye to make it alkaline and yellow. The impurities are then filtered and boiled in vats, further concentrating and separating contamination from the mixture, which is further mixed with fructose and vacuum boiled to crystalize it and put into a centrifuge that separates the molasses from the sugar that is then spin dried.

Dependencies

• Sugar
  • Food preservation
• Sodium chlorate
• Sulfuric acid
  • Fire
• Food

See also

• Farming

References

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article Sugar, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (view authors).

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article Fire, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (view authors).