Sugar

Sugar is a truly amazing commodity and is one that is indispensable to the baker. The term sugar can be applied to more than 100 naturally occurring organic compounds that, by definition, form white or clear crystals when purified, are sweet in flavor, and are water soluble. All forms of sugar are part of the carbohydrate food group. Sugar, as we know it in the kitchen—granulated, powdered, confectioners’, or brown—is sucrose and is the product of an extensive refining process that begins with sugarcane or sugar beets. Although these two plants are totally different in their botanical composition and are often cultivated on opposite sides of the globe, you cannot identify by taste alone whether the sugar you use to sweeten your coffee came from sugarcane or sugar beets; their chemical composition and their flavor are identical after refining. While sugar in different forms has been commercially important since ancient times—in fact, it affected the world as much as any other single commodity during a period that lasted several hundred years—only in the last 150 years have its chemistry and biochemical distinctions been studied. Nobel prizes for studies in sugar chemistry were awarded in 1902, 1937, and 1970.