White Sugar Doesn’t Come From Where You Think It Does

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You should definitely not shy away from DIY without going full primitive technology. This was really enjoyable.

As a note: beet sugar is used in the United States rather than cane sugar because of tariffs. The US subsidizes its agricultural products as a matter of national security. Cane sugar is actually very cheap to make: I've lived in places where its cost is equivalent to flour. But the tariffs push the price of sugar way up. If you're looking for a place where obscure laws from decades ago effect your daily life, this is the place to be.

My grandmother used to grow sugar beets, and hers were huge compared to the ones you had grown. Her secret was a 50/50 sand to topsoil mix in her garden in the area where she had her beets. That way when they were growing, they were able to push the soil away, and the sand allowed the soil to hold on to the water longer (her words, not mine). Her beets were about the size of medium cantelopes.

I remember in science class we used a jar with highly saturated sugar water in it with a string dangling from the lid into the water. After a few days in the window, the string started producing sugar crystals on it. You should try this with your creation and see if it makes crystals. Good luck 👍

For your final products, honestly a pretty close result. One thing I noticed was during the centrifugal process, in my plant, it's washed while spinning with above-boiling water (held under pressure so it doesn't boil), that gives you the white sugar and helps spin off all the impurities. Molasses is actually a byproduct of a byproduct. And for full disclosure, I work at a sugar beet plant

I'd love to see a Collab with NileRed to see if he could do better by having more experience

Sugarbeets are quite common source of sugar here in central Europe. To be honest it is the first source I think of when it comes to sugar

If your sugar say "cane sugar" it can only be sugar cane. If it just says "sugar" it could be corn, beet, or cane, or a combination of those and a host of other sugars.

"We wont have sugar, we'll have caramel" I see this as a clear win

My family actually owns a sugar beet plot!Beet sugar is extremely common in my country,and I've always associated sugar with beets instead of canes.We also use birch sugar but is consudered more "alternative".Up until I was 12 I didn't even know sugar could be made from different plants.

The sugar you made looks actually pretty legit, considering the tools used and it not being a "professional" set up. Historically there used to be huge variations/gradients in the quality of pretty much any ingredient, from flower to salt and sugar between what "peasants" and "nobles" used, where the work and cost invested would be vastly different. Exploring these differences might also be an interesting avenue, though for food that might cross over with Townsends or Tasting History, but who knows, might be an interesting crossover to make different "products" and see what i.e. Max Miller makes of/with them.

When I was a boy, there was a huge sugar factory not far away. I still remember the distinct, quite pleasant smell of the process, which always started at the start of winter. To this day, that smell (which I haven't smelled in over 30 years) will always be associated with the changing seasons.

If you were ever to attempt this experiment again, there is a simple method to increasing the amount of sugar in root crops that has the added benefit of removing the bitter flavor. Leave your beets in the ground until after a frost or two. The plant naturally converts some of its starches into sugar to protect itself from freezing. I am convinced many of our root crops are supposed to be harvested in early winter before they freeze but after the cold weather sweetening has occurred.

Glad Lauren's still part of the team after the fire and rebuild. Hope we see her participating in projects again as things start to return to normal.

I suspect your experiment was made extra hard by the small size of those beets. Sugar beets have many layers of meristematic tissue that are the cells that as the beet grows expand and store sugar. The number of layers is pretty much fixed. So a small beet doesn't have fewer layers, it has many layers that have not expanded and store very little sugar. I'd guess that most of the volume of your beets was contributing more to the impurities you had to remove than to the sugar. But I agree, sugar beets are miserable things. I worked with them when I was a horticulture student at a university in a region of the country where many sugar beets are grown. The sugar content is ok these days but beets also have more protein in them compared to other sugar sources and that makes the refining process difficult. And as you say the molasses, without more refinement, has an off flavor. Much of it is used as a cattle food supplement. Cows love it.

The biggest (or at least most iconic) brand of white sugar here has the word sugar beet printed on the front of the bag along with a drawing of a beet, so it's hardly an obscure fact. Cane sugar is a speciality in Northern Europe

No. I have no other original recollection of sugar sources except beet. I've known this all my life. I found out sugar can come from cane or honey or other sources waaay later.

We grew sugar beets at the farm i grew up at! It was so tasty. I loved eating them during harvest time. Raw, ofc! (Not in the US, though)

This is very fun. I'm from Germany and my grandpa was a farmer who grew sugar beets. I have distinct memories of helping him to weed one of the fields he grew them on.