Sucrose

While the word sugar may rightfully be applied to a variety of nutritive carbohydrate sweeteners, when the term is used without any modifiers, it refers to sucrose. Sucrose is a disaccharide made up of one molecule of fructose, also known as levulose, bonded with one molecule of dextrose, also known as glucose. (To avoid confusion between glucose and glucose syrup—a starch-derived product—the term dextrose is used in this book to refer to that monosaccharide.) The sucrose commonly used in confectionery is one of the purest food substances available—at least 99.8 percent pure sucrose.