Sugar

Cooking and processing

Inverted sugar

Table sugar (As well as brown sugar and a bunch of powdered sugar) is typically sucrose, a specific disaccharide (two sugars together).

When you add a little acid to sucrose, it breaks this double sugar down into its constituents, glucose and fructose.

This happens naturally in jams, jellies, and in cuisines/dishes that use both sugar and sour things (recipes often ask for lemon juice or cream of tartar, but anything acidic will do).

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

It can also be a little smoother, because it now doesn't crystallize as easily.

Inverted sugar is also 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, when you boil much of the plant to separate out much of the sugar out, 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 still contain more vitamins and minerals because they were the rest of the plant.

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. adding taste to e.g. brown sugar (arguably adding back), rye, soy sauce, some beers, etc.

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

Brown sugar

Brown sugar is usually the combination of sucrose and molasses.

Exactly what comes in via the molasses may vary, and it may imply a little invert sugar (see below).

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.

Effects of sugar

TODO