Question from KJR
Recently I was at a health food shop that sold various freshly-made muffins and cookies. Many of them were made with beet sugar. I assumed that these must be a natural sweetener that I missed among the many I use. But I don’t see it here or anywhere else as being anything except an alternative to refined white sugar. Why is the health food store using it?
Thanks for your time!
Debra’s Answer
I don’t know why they are using beet sugar. Here’s what I can tell you about it.
I haven’t included beet sugar on my list of natural sweeteners because I haven’t seen unrefined beet sugar commercially available to home cooks. I did once find some red beet crystals that are simply dehydrated juice of the red beet. Though it was very sweet, it also tasted like dried beets, and it was $25 for one cup, so I didn’t think that was practical.
Beet sugar is made from sugar beets. Sugar beets have been cultivated for thousands of years in one form or another as a vegetable. It was also thought to be a cure for nose and troat ailments and for constipation. But it was not used for sugar, as it’s concentration of sugar was not very high and it was difficult to extract.
Then in 1747, a German chemist, Andreus Marggraf, extacted the sugar from sugar beets using brandy and discovered the sugar in the beet was the same as the sugar in sugar cane. The first factory to make sugar from sugar beets was built in 1799 but it failed because the sugar content was too low.
During the Napolenonic Wars of the early 1800s, an English blockade prevented import of sugar cane to France. Napoleon tuned to sugar beets to satisfy the sweet tooth of his countrymen. He allocated land and money for the farming of sugar beets and the building of sugar mills and refineries. French agriculturists managed to raised the sugar from 7.5% to 17%. By 1814, small factories were operating in France, Belgian Germany, and Austria.
Beet sugar is considered to be of inferior quality to cane sugar. This is why “pure cane sugar” is used in advertising. Where cane sugar is available, it is preferred over beet.
