Sugar

The earliest known sweeteners were honey, sweet fruits, and syrups concentrated from fruit. These are still popular, but nowadays, the most common sweetener is white table sugar, refined from sugar cane or sugar beet. Cane and beet sugar have the same taste and cooking properties. Sugar can also be obtained from certain palm trees and maple trees, as well as from grains such as sorghum and barley.

Due to differences in refining techniques and marketing terminology, sugars vary from country to country. For cane sugar, the juice is extracted and boiled until it crystallizes. The resulting liquid is then passed through a centrifuge to separate the raw sugar crystals from the liquid molasses. The crystals are redissolved and carbon dioxide is added to purify and whiten them. Finally, the sugar is recrystallized into the forms we recognize in our supermarkets. The liquids siphoned off during processing may be made into brown sugars and syrups. For beet sugar, the root, rather than the stem, provides the juice.