Making sugar at home is possible, but very difficult to do. It takes a lot of work and yields very small returns compared to the cost and time expense. If you want to make sugar at home, just know this is in no way easier or cheaper than just buying sugar at the store. For those of you who are not deterred by this, let’s press on and look at how you can make sugar form sugar beets in your very own kitchen.
Some Sugar Beet Math
The home process for making sugar is very inefficient. You will have losses in the cleaning process and the extraction process. On average you can expect to loose about half your beets in the cleaning and preparation process. From there only about 1/5th of the beets will become sugar. So if you start with 10 lbs of beets you should end up with about 1 lb of sugar. This assumes the process goes well and you don’t have a failed batch, which can happen.
How To Make Sugar From Beets
The basic process for making sugar from beets involves chopping or grating the beets, boiling the heck of out them, and then extracting the sugar water mixture. This sugar water then gets reduced until you get what is essentially molasses. That molasses is then poured into trays to dry over several days or weeks (less if you have a dehydrator) before it is crushed and ground into raw sugar. This sugar will not be like store bought white sugar, but instead closer to brown sugar and it will have some residual beet taste.
The Steps to Making Sugar
- Get your beets, expecting about 1 lb of sugar for every 10 lbs of starting beets.
- Peel your beets and remove and discard any discolored or damaged parts of the beets. The more uniform the end result the better. If you are lucky you can retain more than half your starting weight, but on average you will lose half of what you start with.
- Shred or finely dice your beets. Optionally you can use a food processor here.
- Add shredded beets to a large pot and cover with clean water.
- Simmer beets for 1-2 hours until they are completely tender.
- Pour sugar water off of beets into a separate container, straining beet pulp to get every bit of water out that you can. Pressing with cheese cloth can make this easier.
- Reduce the sugar water mixture on the stove until it becomes a brownish liquid with a consistency like honey.
- Pour the resulting liquid into trays as thinly as possible and set aside to dry. This can take up to two weeks. Optionally, if you have a dehydrator, you can accelerate this process dramatically.
- Once the mixture fully hardens break the sugar up and grind it in a mortar and pestle.
- Put sugar into an airtight container and store for later use.
While these steps might not seem to difficult the process can go wrong in a lot of ways. Beets that are not cleaned well may cause the sugar to separate poorly. Extra hard water can keep the sugar from leaving the beets in high quantity. The crystallization stage can also go poorly and you can end up with a sugar sludge instead in some cases.
A lot of the process relies on you having quality sugar beets that are well prepared.
Industrial Beet Processing
In a home kitchen this can be a hassle, but the industrial process is WAY different than this. In industrial sugar beet processing a large portion of the process is spent removing impurities and non-sugar items that come in with the beets. While there are chemical processes to do this they can also use industrial centrifuges which spin everything at a speed that forces the different items to separate by weight and density.
Should I Make Sugar at Home?
No.
This is a crazy process for crazy people. There are some merits to it and you can get bigger and better yields by starting with more raw beets, but the industrial process is just so much better at doing this than you will ever be able to do at home.
So while you can make sugar at home, it’s never really worth unless you have no other options.
Sugar at Home, A Fun Experiment, Not an Everyday Thing
So there you have it. If you want to make sugar at home you can, but it is a lot work and has very meager returns. It’s fun to do once or twice, or if you want to get into a niche hobby, but it is in no way a means by which you will save any time or money on sugar.
Happy Homesteading!