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In our everyday lives we use sugar in a variety of forms. The most common is granulated sugar. This is used by many people to sweeten hot drinks and breakfast cereals. Sugar can also be bought in cubes, which are made by pressing wet sugar into moulds before drying. Icing sugar, used for coating cakes and pastries is made by grinding the sugar crystals into a fine powder.
Other sugars include caster sugar (finer than granulated and used for baking), preserving sugar (coarser than granulated and used for jams and jellies), and brown sugar (for colour and flavour). Syrups and treacle (for cooking and spreading) are liquid forms of sugar. It is also possible to buy organic sugar. This sugar may be produced from beet or cane that has been grown to strictly controlled recognised international standards.
Sugar is not just a sweetener, it can be used in a number of different ways:
- As a preservative: at the right concentration sugar helps to stop microorganisms growing and so prevents food spoilage. For example, as in jams and other preserves. This is why reduced sugar jams spoil much more quickly than traditional jams.
- It helps to produce subtle changes in flavour. Sugar offsets the acidity and sour flavour in many foods such as mayonnaise, tomato products and tart fruits like gooseberries and grapefruit.
- As a bulking agent: sugar gives the characteristic texture to a variety of foods - including jams, ice cream and cakes.
- To raise the boiling point or lower the freezing point. This is essential in some recipes, for example making ice cream.
- To speed up the process of fermentation (by yeast) in baking. This makes the dough rise, for example, bread and tea-cakes.
- It makes cakes light and open-textured when it is beaten with butter or eggs in a recipe.
Sugar in foods
Sugar is added to many foods for flavour, texture, colour and safety. By reading the ingredients panel on food packaging labels you will see how many ordinary foods contain sugars. Remember glucose, fructose, sucrose, and lactose (milk sugar) are all sugars. Other terms for sugars include dextrose, invert sugar and maltose.
Did you know that sugars:
Are also used to help in the healing of some types of wounds?
Are used by chemical manufacturers to grow penicillin?
Can be added to concrete to aid the setting process?
Absorb moisture and therefore keep your biscuits crunchy?
Help flowers stay fresher for longer when added to their water?
Form the glass used in film stunts?
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Sugar comes in a variety of different formats
Sugar has many different uses
'Sugar glass' as used in a film stunt
(The Kinney Company / The Ronald Grant Archive)
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