Uses of sugar

Uses of sugar 

 

Sugar has many different uses, such as the following:

·         As a sweetener: Sugar is added to foods or drinks for increasing their taste.

·         As a preservative: Sugar is a natural preservative. It reduces the growth of micro-organisms and, hence, prevents food from getting foul.

·         As a bulking agent: Sugars give the characteristic texture to a variety of foods from jams to frozen products.

·         To speed up the process of fermentation (by yeast) in baking. This makes the dough rise, for example, in bread and cakes.

·         It makes cakes light and open-textured when it is beaten with butter or eggs in a recipe.

·         Some of the unconventional uses of sugar are as follows:

·         Can be added to concrete to aid the setting process

·         Absorbs moisture and therefore keeps biscuits crunchy

Alternate sweeteners/sugar substitutes

In India, alternate sweeteners to sugar are gur and khandsari. Internationally, derivatives of corn, such as corn syrups, dextrose and high fructose corn syrup, are used as sugar substitutes.

Gur

Concentrated and solidified sugarcane juice is gur. The juice is extracted by bullock-driven or power-driven crushers. The juice extracted is 45-55 per cent of the total sugarcane crushed.

The juice is heated in an open pan and later purified by adding lime, deola, bhindi extract, etc. The impurities are removed by a hand ladle, leaving behind a clear light-brown juice. The clear juice is heated to its super saturation stage in a round open pan. Sometimes sodium hydrosulphite, also called hydros, is added while concentrating the juice, which gives the gur its golden colour. The concentrated mass is cooled and moulded into different shapes in different regions. One tonne of sugarcane, containing around 12.5 per cent sucrose, yields around one quintal of gur.

Khandsari

Khandsari sugar is a semi-white sugar produced in India. It is generally produced by small producers through the open pan technology. In the production of khandsari, the recovery rate is 5.5-7 per cent.

The juice is extracted from sugarcane in mills. The juice extracted is 70-75 per cent of the total sugarcane crushed. The juice is purified by adding deola, bhindi extract, etc. In some cases, lime and sulphur dioxide gas are also used to purify the juice. The purified juice is heated at 1,000 degrees C in round open pans. The heated juice is pumped to settling tanks, where the impurities settle down at the bottom, leaving a layer of clear juice at the top. The juice, containing impurities, is filtered in a cloth bag. The clear juice is boiled till it reaches super saturation, and sugar nuclei are formed. It is then transferred into air-cooled crystalisers, where the sugar nuclei are allowed to develop for 3-4 days before drying up.

The chemical composition and physical appearance of khandsari sugar is similar to that of sugar produced in vacuum pan factories. The molasses produced is rich in sucrose content and is used for manufacturing alcohol, tobacco curing, cattle feed, and producing inferior quality gur.

Corn syrups, dextrose and high fructose corn syrup (HFCS)

Syrup refineries produce a multitude of products by processing starch. High fructose syrup, which is used as a sweetener, is one of them. Starch, a polymer of dextrose is heated and processed with enzymes. This process hydrolyses the starch into dextrose. The first step in this process is liquefaction, which produces gross break down of the starch into a starch hydrolysate which is further processed via de-colorisation, de-ionisation, concentration and sold as a syrup or maltodextrin, depending on the dextrose equivalent.

In order to produce dextrose syrup, the hydrosylate must undergo a second step called saccharification, which completes the hydrolysis of the starch into dextrose syrup.

The dextrose, when further processed in the presence of an isomerate enzyme, produces fructose. Fructose, as collected from the isomerisation process has to be refined for removing the colours, odours and ash introduced during the reaction process. This is done to make it saleable; and to adjust the concentration for making it suitable for shipping and storage.

These alternative sweeteners are used in most of the nutritive sweeteners, soft drinks, and a number of other applications, due to their additional advantages. For instance, corn syrups can depress freezing to prevent the formation of crystals in ice cream and frozen desserts. Also, these sweeteners help in calorie reduction.