Sugar

Cooking and processing

Inverted sugar

When you add a little acid (such as lemon juice or cream of tartar) to sucrose (which is a double sugar), it breaks down into its constituents, glucose and fructose.

This happens naturally in jams, jellies, and in cuisines/dishes that use both sugar and sour things.

Inverted sugar tastes sweeter, because fructose is itself sweeter than glucose and the original sucrose.

It can also be a little smoother because in a mix, sucrose doesn't crystallize as easily.

Inverted sugar is loosely associated with syrups,

in part because while cooking, you're likely boiling off water means it is also associated with being more syrupy.

inverted sugar is often sold as a syrup.

See also:

• http://www.exploratorium.edu/cooking/candy/sugar.html

Molasses

By-product of refining sugarcane or sugarbeet into sucrose.

Roughly speaking, you can boil much of the plant to get much of the sugar out, and molasses is what is left. Exactly how messy that is depends on what you put in.

Molasses contains relatively little sugar (depending on how much you boil it), and may contain vitamins and minerals.

While still containing sugar, and mostly edible, the taste is far from sugar's taste, so it was sometimes eaten, sometimes thrown away, and found other uses, including distillation in rum, citric acid production, yeast production. and adding taste to e.g. brown sugar, rye, soy sauce, some beers, etc.

(TODO: difference between sugarbeet molasses and sugarcane molasses?)

Brown sugar

A combination of two or more from:

• sucrose
• inverted sugar (see below)
• molasses
• caramel

The combination, proportions, and product names vary regionally.

Types of sugar

tl;dr:

• sucrose is the combination of glucose+fructose, found e.g. in sugarbeet and sugarcane

table sugar is typically sucrose

('inverting' sugar separates the two)

• fructose is naturally common, e.g. in fruit

• glucose is the most central (and our body's most central, and easiest, fuel)

• e.g. starch and cellulose are chemically rather longer - which also implies you barely process them

Disaccharides

A disaccharade, or double sugar, is two monosaccharides joined.

This e.g. includes sucrose, lactose, and maltose.