How to make brown sugar or soft sugar
Brown sugar or soft sugar :
a) Brown sugar is a value-added specialty product that wide popularity in North America. The name is derived from the texture or mouth feels of the product which should be smooth and velvety as opposed to the hard, gritty feel of granulated sugar.
b) This texture is the result of a very fine crystalline structure coated in highly flavored syrup.
Brown sugar is made by boiling fine crystals from various purified and relatively low purity syrups in vacuum pan. The mass of crystals, ranging from 180 to 240 microns, is covered with the layer of colored, molasses flavored syrup.
c) The value of brown sugar is unique flavor and colour.
d) These characteristics of brown sugar is low in total color, free of the greenish casts imparted by polyphenols of iron, relatively low in purity, low in ash, and high in invert sugar.
e) Brown sugar also called as soft sugar.
Types of Brown sugar or soft sugar
Brown sugars are classified according to series of arbitrary trade colour stranded numbered from 1 to 16. The most popular brown sugars are No. 9 , 10 & 13
No.9 – Light Yellow,No.
10 — Deep yellow or light brown,
No.13 – Deep brown.
General Specifications of brown sugar.
| Parameters | Light Brown | Dark Brown |
| Colour ( ICUMSA) | 3000 to 6000 | 7000 to 11000 |
| Moisture% | 2.0 to 3.0 | 2.5 to 3.5 |
| Sucrose % | 88 to 93 | 88 to 93 |
| Invert % | 1.5 to 4.5 | 1.5 to 5.0 |
Typical specification of soft sugar:
| Parameters | Boiled | Blended | ||
| Medium | Dark | Medium | Dark | |
| Sucrose % | 85 to 93 | 85 to 93 | 90 to 96 | 90 to 96 |
| Invert % | 1.5 to 4.5 | 1.5 to 5.0 | 2 to 5 | 2 to 5 |
| Ash % | 1 to 2 | 1 to 2.5 | 0.3 to 1 | 0.3 to 1 |
| Non sugar % | 2 to 4.5 | 2 to 4.5 | 1 to 3 | 1 to 3 |
| Moisture % | 2 to 3.5 | 2 to 3.5 | 1 to 2.5 | 1 to 2.5 |
| Colour (ICUMSA) | 3000 to 6000 | 7000 to 11000 | 3000 to 6000 | 7000 to 11000 |
Brown sugar making Process:
Brown or Soft sugar can be boiled, in the traditional manner, by direct from dark, low- purity syrups obtained during the refining process, or blended by coating very fine granulated sugar crystals with refined syrup.
- Boiling soft sugar method.
- Blended soft sugar method.
Boiling soft sugar method:
a) Boiled sugars can be further subdivided into agglomerated grain and single-crystal styles.
Characteristics of Starting Materials
b) The boiling scheme in which 40% of the strike is composed of runoff syrup from the previous strike requires only 1.2 tonnes of 3300 color syrup at 88 purity to produce 1 tonne of soft. Since this material is of a higher starting purity, lower material costs and less equipment are required for purification.
c) A suitable starting material can usually be prepared from a blend of 85% fourth runoff syrup and 15% B molasses, giving a yellow liquor of approximately 88 purity and 12,000 ICUMSA
Single-crystal styles
a) Single grain sugars are boiled in such a way as to give uniform single crystals between 180 and 240 Crystal size distributions less than this gives a muddy or mottled appearance and difficulty in purging.
b) Larger crystals give a gritty appearance and “hard” texture to the finished product. Because of the single-grain nature of the product, there is a limited amount of crystal surface area to carry the syrup. As a result, this type of sugar rarely has nonsucrose content much greater than 50/0.
c) It is possible to increase the overall surface area slightly by creating a second crop of sugar crystals partway through the strike by seeding a second time. This will create a second, smaller distribution of crystals within the original massecuite.
d) Quantity and size of this second crop must be carefully controlled in order not to pack the centrifugals and prevent proper purging.
The technique for boiling such a strike is usually divided into three stages:
1. Boiling-down charge
2. Graining charge, and
3. Final charge.
The boiling-down charge is divided into two separate charges, the first having a slightly lower purity than after the first crop of sugar crystals has been established to the desired size, a second charge of higher purity is given and a second crop of crystal is introduced.
The first charge can have a purity of 89 and can be followed by a second charge of 94 purity to give an overall charge purity of 91. The final charge is introduced as a dilutent to restore fluidity to the massecuite and reduce the overall purity of the final massecuite.
Agglomerated crystal styles:
Agglomerated style soft sugar is made up of very fine sugar crystals between 50 and 75microns in size which have been allowed to fuse together in the pan to produce stable particles between 500 and 1000 microns. This produces a final product with a much greater amount of surface area which can still be purged efficiently in a batch centrifugal to produce a soft sugar containing 8 to 11% nonsucrose.
In addition agglomerated softs have an almost free flowing appearance and can readily be packaged in high-speed packaging equipment with relative ease.
Blended soft sugar method :
a) Soft sugars can also be prepared by blending selected refinery syrups with granulated sugar on a continuous basis. Proponents of blending cite the following advantages of this type of production facility; It automatically meets the changing throughput requirements of the packing station.
b) It reduces load on purification equipment and materials such as ion exchange and filter presses.
c) It provides more flexible scheduling for both the process and packing departments, based on crew availability as opposed to pan availability.
d) It allows for tighter tolerances in product quality control.
e) In general, soft sugar blending offers a lower capital-cost alternative to boiling in cases where expanded or new capacity is required. Maintenance costs associated with the blending equipment can also be expected to be less than that associated with vacuum pans, mixers, and batch centrifugals. Blending also offers the potential to make limited runs of special or custom-coated products, either by color or by panic size.
Packing:
Soft sugar are packed after cooling with contain moisture 1 to 4% and required moisture proof containers such as multiwall bags with a laminated polyethylene sheet. Cartons of soft carry wax paper, glassine, or aluminum foil liners Brown sugars are packed 50 to 100kgs bags for industrial customers and 1 to 2 kg containers for household uses.
The Popularity of brown sugar is likely to be due to the idea held by consumers that brown coloured products are more natural , healthier and more valuable.
Brown sugar vs White sugar
a) Sucrose percent higher in white sugar when compare to brown sugar.
b) Brown sugar containing light molasses film on the surface of the crystal but white sugar fully washed and its not having any molasses percent.
c) Brown or soft sugar both contain marginally a greater number of minerals than refined or white sugar due to simply they contain molasses.
d) In White sugar process using lime and sulphur dioxide as a clarification agents but in brown sugar process using only lime in clarification process.
Brown Sugar and its health
Brown sugar is made by some portion of the sugary molasses to stay in its structure so soft sugar gives you a touch of calcium, potassium, iron and magnesium. These minerals can all help your body reach mineral equilibrium.
In this process not required the additives like sulphur dioxide, calcium hydroxide, and carbon filters etc. Those added substances are not should have been available in the brown sugar.
Brief Description : In this article explained about definitions of Brown sugar, its different making methods and also given its classification and specifications of different grades of brown sugar. And finally compare the white and brown sugars.
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