Question from Tessa M
I just found your blog and I am impressed – so much help!
Recently, I have been trying to find an ice cream that has been sweetened with a natural sweetner. I have seen a few made with “evaporated cane juice” but was curious if that is the same as “crystallized raw cane juice?” I didn’t know if how they evaporate the cane juice took changed or added anything which would case it to no longer be a whole food? Any help would be great!!
Debra’s Answer
I’m going to give you a quick answer here, though there is more explanation. One day I will sit down and write it all out.
All cane sugar starts with the raw sugar cane. It is very fiberous. If you take a piece in your mouth and chew on it, it will taste very sweet as the juice is released. If you can get fresh sugar cane (we can here in Florida), try it. It is a whole, sweet food with lots of nutrients.
The next step is to press the cane in a very heavy duty machine that presses the juice from the fiber. I’ve looked for a hand-crank sugar cane press, and the few that exist are expensive. It’s not like juicing oranges! A local restaurant here has an expensive motorized sugar cane press and they make fresh sugar cane juice to sweeten drinks. I’ve had it and it is wonderful. It’s essentially like chewing on sugar cane, only the machine does the chewing. Though sugar cane is fiberous, you can’t eat the fiber–what you can get out of the sugar cane is the juice.
Now, you can take that sugar cane juice and remove the water. That is evaporated cane juice. It’s the whole cane juice with nothing added or removed, except the water. It is a powder–not a crystal. If you want to consume it in it’s natural form, as it would be straight from the cane, mix it with water, about a teaspoon in a half a cup of water.
Jumping ahead, the process of refining sugar is one of heating this cane juice until it separates into the pure white sugar crystals and the syrupy sludge of “impurities” (all the nutrients) that we call molasses. By the way, what we call “brown sugar” is refined white sugar with molasses added, not the same as the whole evaporated cane juice.
I suppose evaporated cane juice could be “raw” if it was evaporated at low temperatures, but I don’t think you could get it to crystalize without boiling it, and then it wouldn’t be raw.
