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Beet sugar is extracted from Beta vulgaris and accounts for 30% of the world’s sugar supply. It is cheaper and easier to produce than cane sugar, but behaves differently when cooking. Beet sugar is made by washing, shredding, and diffusing the beets to extract the sugar, then crystallizing the syrup. Brown sugar from beets may not distribute flavor evenly and can produce disappointing results when cooked.
Beet sugar is a form of sugar that is extracted from a cultivar of Beta vulgaris, the common beet. About 30% of the world’s sugar supply comes from beets. Most markets carry this sugar, though it may not always be explicitly labeled, and if you have white sugar in your cupboards, there’s a good chance it was made with beets. Because beet sugar behaves slightly differently than brown sugar, it can be important to check the packaging of the sugar to determine its origin, especially when cooking.
Humans have been growing beets for thousands of years and they may be among the oldest European and Middle Eastern root vegetables. However, their potential as a source of sucrose wasn’t realized until about 1500, and it took several hundred years before a reliable, sugar-rich beet variety was developed. In the early 1800s, beet sugar processing plants began opening in Europe, and slowly spread to the United States.
One of the main benefits of using beets for sugar is that beets can be grown in temperate climates and are very hardy. Sugarcane requires a tropical environment and tropical land is often at a premium, as many people like to visit the tropics for vacation. The fact that sugar beets can be grown in colder regions and on poor quality soil makes them an attractive alternative to cane as they are cheaper to grow. Beet sugar is also much easier to produce, requiring basic processing in one facility, rather than a two-step process, as is required for cane.
To make beet sugar, the beets are washed, shredded and passed through a diffuser, which forces hot water past the beet shards to extract the sugar. The resulting juice is combined with liquids squeezed from the beet pulp and then purified before evaporating to condense into a thick syrup. The syrup is then crystallized to produce beet sugar, which is chemically nearly identical to cane sugar. Although the two sugars are virtually the same, small variations between the two can make a big difference.
If a sugar producer wants to make brown sugar, the molasses made from the brown sugar must be added to the beet sugar after processing. For bakers, this has proven to be a problem, as the molasses may not fully penetrate the sugar granules, leading to uneven flavor distribution. Brown sugar from beets also tends to perform differently when cooked, sometimes producing rather disappointing end products; for this reason, some bakers prefer to use pure brown sugar.
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