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Beet Sugar, Cane Sugar and Raw Cane Sugar: These are the Differences

Which sugar is hidden behind beet sugar, cane sugar and raw cane sugar? We explain the differences between the types of sugar and give tips on what to look out for when buying.

Cane sugar, raw cane sugar and whole cane sugar

Cane sugar is obtained from sugar cane. Sugar cane is grown in tropical countries like Brazil, South Africa, Australia or Cuba. Three different types of sugar can be made from cane sugar. They differed in the degree to which they were refined.

Whole cane sugar: The first and healthiest level of cane sugar is whole cane sugar. The sugar cane juice obtained is only thickened, dried and then ground. This preserves the molasses with its valuable minerals and vitamins. It is also responsible for the caramel flavor and the brown color of whole cane sugar.

Raw cane sugar: This is the variant for which the sugar crystals are only refined once. As a result, a small part of the molasses is retained and is responsible for the slightly brownish colour.

Cane sugar: The white cane sugar has been subjected to the refining process until it no longer contains any molasses. It not only lacks the brownish colour, but also the healthy minerals and vitamins.

Beet sugar

Beet sugar: Beet sugar is almost identical to raw sugar. Both consist of sucrose and have the same chemical composition. Beet sugar is obtained from sugar beet – a regional product. Sugar beets are grown in Central Europe. You will not find raw beet sugar, which would contain a small amount of healthy minerals from the sugar beet juice, on the market because it has an unpleasant taste.

Cane sugar and beet sugar are refined

The processing of sugar cane and sugar beet is similar. First, beets or sugar cane are crushed and juiced at at least 70°C. This raw juice is then treated with lime, carbonic acid and filters to remove unwanted substances such as proteins or minerals.

By further, slow heating, the raw juice is thickened until sugar crystals form. This is the so-called raw sugar with the characteristic yellow-brown color. In order to turn it into beautiful, white granulated sugar, the sugar crystals are dissolved and crystallized again and again. This process takes up to eight hours and is called refining, which is why white sugar is also called refined sugar. It doesn’t matter which plant the sugar comes from. Cane sugar can also be refined and thereby form white crystals.

What to look out for when shopping for sugar

When shopping, you should first be aware that too much sugar is not healthy. It doesn’t matter whether it’s beet sugar, cane sugar or other types of sugar: 100 grams of sugar contain around 400 calories and no vitamins whatsoever. It is responsible for many diseases of affluence.

It is true that “unrefined sugar” contains more minerals. However, their total content is less than one percent. In order for you to have any health benefit from eating unrefined sugar, you would need to eat a few pounds of it. That would be anything but healthy. Because there is no refining, it can be considered more sustainable – and is therefore the better one.

Also, don’t fall for the misconception that brown sugar is healthier than white sugar. Oftentimes, brown sugar is just conventional white beet or cane sugar that has been colored brown.

Disadvantages of cane sugar are the long transport routes and land reclamation for the sugar cane cultivation areas. Beet sugar comes from sugar beets from the local region, but – like cane sugar – requires a lot of energy to process.

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Food

Cooking Beets in the Oven: So Delicious and Healthy

Beetroot is particularly tasty when you prepare it in the oven. We present a method how you can easily cook beets in the oven.

You can not only boil, roast or eat beetroot raw, you can also cook it in the oven. This cooking method softens the tuber’s earthy flavor and brings out its natural sweetness. Beetroot should also convince those who were previously skeptical about its intense aroma.

Beetroot is not only a versatile vegetable, but also a source of valuable micronutrients such as phytochemicals, iron, vitamin C and B vitamins. Just 200 grams cover around 50 percent of your daily folic acid requirement.

You can get the healthy tuber either fresh from the field or from storage almost all year round. The main harvest season lasts from October to March. Fresh beetroot can therefore provide you with important nutrients, especially in the winter months. If possible, make sure that you buy organic beetroot. In this way you support agriculture that does not use chemical-synthetic pesticides and thus protects the soil and the environment.

We’ll show you a way to cook beets into a delicious dish in the oven. This oven-roasted vegetable tastes great as a side dish or as part of delicious and nutritious Buddha bowls.

Cooking beetroot in the oven: As an aromatic oven vegetable

Idea: If you end up wanting to make a soup, puree or spread from the beetroot, you can save time and energy by first cutting the beetroot into very small pieces and then cooking them in the oven.

Ingredients:

500 g small beetroot
3 cloves garlic
2 tablespoons olive or frying oil
2 tbsp white wine vinegar
1 tablespoon molasses or other liquid sweetener
Salt and pepper to taste
3 sprigs of rosemary

Directions:

Wash and scrub the beets thoroughly and cut off the core. Then halve the tubers. You don’t have to peel them. Peel the garlic and press the cloves with the flat side of a knife until they pop open slightly.
Place the beets and garlic in a casserole dish. Mix the oil with the vinegar, liquid sweetener, salt and pepper. Pour the marinade over the vegetables and mix well. Place the rosemary sprigs on the beets.
Roast the beets in the oven at 200°C (top/bottom heat) for about 40 to 60 minutes until the tubers are soft. Turn the vegetables every 20 minutes.

Here’s how to use oven-cooked beets

You can process beetroot from the oven in many ways:

You can also cut the beetroot into thin slices and use them to cover a tarte flambée.
Instead of raw beetroot, you can also use oven-cooked tubers for a beetroot carpaccio.
If you fancy a special cake, you can use the beetroot in a chocolate cake. You won’t be able to taste the tuber, but it ensures that the cake is nice and moist.
The spiced beetroot tastes good in Buddha bowls, a millet bowl, in salads, for example a pearl barley salad, or together with a dip.

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Food

Butter Beet: Worth Knowing and Recipe Ideas

Buttered turnips taste similar to swedes, but are smaller and milder. The old vegetable variety has been enjoying greater popularity again for some time. Here you can find out interesting facts about their properties as well as cultivation and use.

Butter beets are an old type of vegetable that can be found increasingly at weekly markets and in (organic) supermarkets. The butter beet belongs to the subspecies of turnips and is distinguished from other varieties such as the navette by the golden yellow color of its skin. It is therefore also known under the name “gold beet”. The taste is more comparable to the swede. The butter beet is not only smaller, it also tastes tenderer and milder.

Good to know: Despite the similarity in taste, the butter beet is not directly related to the swede. Botanically speaking, turnips are a subspecies of oilseed rape and belong to the same genus, but not the same species as turnips. However, the swede is also sometimes referred to colloquially as butter turnip – this can cause confusion.

Nutritional values and ingredients of butter beets

Turnips are generally considered to be rich in nutrients. In addition to butter beets and navettes, this subspecies also includes the small, cone-shaped Teltower turnips. The amounts of nutrients can of course vary slightly from variety to variety. On average, raw turnips contain the following basic nutritional values per 100 grams:

Calorific value: 28 kcl (117 kJ)
Protein: 0.9 grams
Fat: 0.1 grams
Carbohydrates: 6.43 grams (including 3.8 grams of sugar)
Fiber: 1.8 grams

In addition, turnips are rich in minerals. Per 100 grams they provide, among other things:

191 milligrams of potassium
67 milligrams of sodium
30 milligrams of calcium
27 milligrams of phosphorus
11 milligrams of magnesium
0.3 milligrams of iron
15 micrograms of folic acid

Vitamin C (21 milligrams) and vitamin K (0.1 micrograms) are also contained in turnips such as butter beet. For better classification: The daily requirement of vitamin C is 110 milligrams for men and 95 milligrams for women.

Butter beets: seasonal and home-grown

Butter beets can be grown as May beets, but also as autumn beets. Accordingly, the harvest time falls either in May or between October and November. Butter beets are often available from storage for up to two months after the end of the harvest.

The butter beet is an easy-care vegetable and can also be easily grown in your own garden. Depending on whether you want to harvest in May or in the fall, you should plant the seeds in late March/early April or mid-July/late August. You do this as follows:

First select a suitable location. A sunny and not too dry location is particularly important. Butter beets, on the other hand, do not make any special demands on the soil conditions.
Prepare the soil for sowing by loosening the soil a bit. If necessary, remove weeds from the bed.
Make seed furrows in the soil 30 to 40 centimeters apart. They should be an inch or two deep.
Spread the seeds evenly over the grooves, then cover them with soil.
Finally, water the seeds generously.
Butter beets do not require much care after sowing. Just make sure to water them regularly, but avoid waterlogging.

After a week, the first germs should appear. The butter beets are ready for harvest after about eight weeks. Once harvested, they will keep in a cool place for about a week or two.

The butter beet in the kitchen: this is how you use it

In the kitchen you can use the butter beet both raw and cooked. Freshly harvested butter beets taste particularly fine and mild when raw. Grated or cut into fine strips, they make a delicious raw vegetable salad, for example. You can also add them to mixed salads.

Because of the similar taste, buttered turnips are generally a good alternative to swedes. You can easily prepare many swede recipes with buttered turnips, for example the classic swede stew, a simple swede soup or an exotic swede curry.

You can also prepare butter beets as a hearty side dish or starter – for example as beet puree or steamed in a little butter or margarine. Here we present a simple recipe for spicy seasoned butter beets from the pan.

Recipe: Spicy buttered beets from the pan

Ingredients:

1 kg butter beets 4 sprigs of rosemary
30 g butter or margarine salt chili flakes
1 tbsp honey
200 ml apple juice

Directions:

Wash the butter beets under running water. Remove the stalk and root end. Peel the beets and cut them into quarters.
Wash the rosemary and shake dry.
Heat butter or margarine in a pan. Add the beets and rosemary and sauté for 3 to 5 minutes.
Then add the salt, chili flakes, honey, and apple juice to the pan. Mix everything together well.
Cover the butter beets and let them cook in the pan over low heat for about ten minutes. Remove the lid just before the end of the cooking time and let the remaining liquid boil down over high heat. Toss the vegetables occasionally to keep them from burning.
Finally, remove the rosemary sprigs and season the buttered beets with salt and chilli flakes.

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19 Amazing Facts About Beets

Beets are a genus of annual, biennial and perennial herbaceous plants of the Amaranth family. Do you know a lot about Beets?

  1. The most famous representatives are: common beets, fodder beets, sugar beets. All of them in everyday life have a common name – beets.
  2. Found on all continents except Antarctica.
  3. All modern beet species come from the wild beet growing to this day in Iran, on the shores of the Mediterranean, Black and Caspian Sea, as well as in India and China.
  4. For the first time in the daily diet, beets began to be introduced in the Middle East and in the east of the Mediterranean – although at that time only the leaves were eaten, and the roots were used for medicinal purposes.
  5. Assyrian texts describe the cultivation of beets in the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, which is one of the seven wonders of the world.
  6. In ancient Persia, beets were considered a symbol of quarrels and strife.
  7. During the Roman era, it was used as an aphrodisiac.
  8. Beetroot was held in such high esteem by the Romans that it was collected as a tribute from the subordinates of the Germans. At that time, the root crop was long and thin like a carrot.
  9. In ancient times, the medicinal properties of beet root were more important than its taste, and the vegetable was used to treat a variety of ailments, including constipation, fever, wounds, and some skin problems.
  10. The ancestors used beets instead of blush.
  11. The rounded shape of the root crop known to us today appeared only in the 16th century.
  12. In the XVI – XVII centuries. it was differentiated into dining and fodder forms. In terms of chemical composition, fodder beets differ little from other types of beets, but their roots contain a large amount of fiber and fiber.
  13. From the hybrid forms of fodder beets, sugar beets emerged in the 18th century. It appeared as a result of intensive work of breeders, which began in 1747, when Andreas Marggraf found out that sugar, which was previously obtained from sugar cane, is also contained in beets. The first to appreciate and practically use the Discovery of Marggraf was only his student Franz Karl Achard, who devoted his life to the problem of producing beet sugar and in 1801 equipped a factory in Lower Silesia where sugar was produced from beets. At that, the sugar content in fodder beets was 1.3%, while in the currently existing varieties it exceeds 20%. Sugar beet is currently the second largest source of sugar after sugar cane.
  14. From the end of the XIX and in the XX centuries. the culture has spread to all continents. According to popular legends, the widespread consumption of beets by the peoples of the Balkans and Eastern Europe prevented the development of medieval plague epidemics in the east of the European continent.
  15. To date, more than 70 varieties and hybrids of beets have been zoned, differing in appearance, yield, and early maturity.
  16. The heaviest beet in the world was grown in Somerset in 2001 and weighed 23.4 kg.
  17. Beets perfectly cleanse the body of toxins and toxins.
  18. In Britain and Ireland, halloween lanterns in the form of a glowing head from the inside were traditionally made from beets, turnips or rutabagas. Lantern pumpkins, more familiar to us now, began to be used by American immigrants in the 19th century.
  19. In many cultures, there is a belief that if a man and a woman eat the same beets, they will love each other.
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