Autumn is the season of harvest, and the autumn harvest in Southeast Province is exceptionally sweet!

On the Tainan Plain, it is like being in the ocean of sugar cane fields. The green sugar cane fields are one after the other, and the dense cane leaves dance in the wind.

During the harvest season, the sugarcane fields are busy. Sugar farmers were busy harvesting with sickles, and bundles of sugar cane with heads and tails cut off filled the fields.

Yan Changwu took matters into his own hands, cut the first sickle, washed the sugarcane he cut, and took a bite, it was so sweet!

Chen Xinji, who had been prepared for a long time, opened a sugar factory to make sugar from sugarcane!

At this time, on the Tainan Plain, towering chimneys began to spew thick black smoke, the sugar press kept turning day and night, and the air was filled with the sweet fragrance of cane sugar.

Using sugarcane as raw material, the process of making white sugar, jaggery sugar and other products through the processes of juice extraction, purification, evaporation, crystallization, honey separation and drying, Southeast Province makes three sugars!

Which trisaccharides?

Brown sugar, white sugar and rock sugar!

In 1130, Wang Zhuo of the Northern Song Dynasty wrote China's first sugar-making monograph, "Frosting Spectrum". The book is divided into 7 chapters, which are rich in content, respectively describing the history of the development of sugar production in China, the planting method of sugarcane, the equipment for sugar production (including pressing and boiling equipment), the technological process, the icing taste, the use, and the economy of the sugar industry.

Selection and production of soil sugar

1. Material selection: Select the ripe cane in the sugarcane ripening season, and remove the sugarcane leaves, tail end and impurities after material selection.

2. Juice extraction: use two large stone mills for the soil cane press, there are 18 grooves chiseled above the big stone mill, insert a wooden wedge, equivalent to a gear, there is a wooden pile fixed on it, equivalent to the axis, the top of the axis wooden pile is horizontally connected with a large beam (commonly known as "penny mast"), rely on animal power (generally with a cow) to pull the "penny mast", drive the two boulder mills to roll each other, sugarcane is crushed into juice, cane juice flows into the juice storage tank after filtering along the stone trough under the boulder mill.

3. Filtration: The sugar worker scoops the cane juice in the juice storage tank into the wooden barrel with a wooden scoop, and then pours it into a large water tank equipped with a slender filter screen for filtration. Finally, the filtered cane juice is introduced into the sugar pot through a bamboo conduit.

4. Boiling: Heat and boil the filtered sugarcane juice to 280°C-300°C, and stir constantly to remove foam and impurities, so that the water continues to evaporate. Heating raw materials are generally made of wood or bagasse.

5. Coagulation: Mix with a small amount of sugarcane juice and sea lime (play the role of coagulation and neutralization) and stir well, wait for the sugarcane juice in the sugar pot to boil for 2-4 hours, pour the precipitated sea lime water into the sugar pot, and stir constantly, and the syrup is gradually formed.

6. Sugar: from the initial sugarcane juice→ sugar water → syrup (the whole process is 6-10 hours). The whole process should pay attention to time, heat, color, viscosity, etc.

7. Sugar: After the sugar is raised (slightly earlier than the sugar bar), the syrup is loaded into the iron pot, and the pre-prepared wooden stick is constantly stirred, requiring balanced strength and moderate speed. After about 20 minutes, boil until the juice turns golden brown into syrup. The bubbling syrup is poured onto a platform covered with bamboo mats, and while the syrup cools, people use tools to spread the syrup evenly. After a while, the syrup turns into brown sugar with a yellowish white color.

Specially invited sugar masters from all over Fujian, they operate by hand, and in the production process, heat is very important. For example, the heat of sugar, the sugar is light early, the sugar is difficult to solidify, the heat is heavy later, the sugar has a bitter taste, and only the heat in place can ensure that the appearance of the sugar is beautiful and the taste is sweet.

In addition to the heat, be patient. On the fire pit, the cane sugar water has to be boiled for four or five hours to allow most of the water to evaporate, and the cane sugar has the strongest flavor. The masters said: "In the process of boiling, we have to keep cleaning up impurities and stirring, so the most important thing in sugar production is to be careful, even if it is sugarcane water, it must be filtered many times before it can be put into the pot to boil." ”

Freshly made original brown sugar, absolutely no pigments and flavors were added at that time, and the entrance was sweet, aftertaste, and endless.

This clump of brown sugar is the crystallization of the hard work of the people, and it is a good season for the fragrance of brown sugar. The brown sugar made by the ancient method retains more nutrients of sugarcane, can quickly replenish physical strength, contains carbohydrates that can provide caloric energy, riboflavin, carotene, niacin and trace elements such as manganese, zinc, chromium and other elements indispensable for human growth and development.

Rich in nutrition, delicious and fragrant, Yan Changwu is happy after tasting it!

……

Chinese people like to eat brown sugar, but if they want to sell it to Hongmaofan, they need white sugar.

White sand sugar is decolorized from brown sand sugar, and how to decolorize has become the key to technology.

In the middle of Jiajing in the Ming Dynasty, there was a sugar maker surnamed Huang in Nan'an, and the family's house collapsed because of the continuous spring rain. At that time, most of the houses were built of rammed earth, and the collapsed yellow mud walls crushed his family's red sand sugar. Unexpectedly, after the long rainy season, the family removed the soil and found that all the brown sugar in the house had turned white!

The accident turns into a comedy in an instant, and the secret of Bai Shatang is revealed. As a result, according to the "yellow mud decolorization method" of the Nan'an people, Fujian's white sand sugar can finally be quantitatively produced.

However, at that time, the white sand candy was only lighter in color and brighter at best, and there was no way to achieve pure white.

At this time, it shows the power of the traverser, the system does not use the yellow mud decolorization method, the workers take out a bag of black charcoal and put it into the brown sugar syrup, it is simply a magic stirring, and then a filter, it becomes a colorless and clear solution, which is for clear juice, and it is to crystallize at this time.

The clear juice is evaporated and concentrated to become a raw syrup. It must be further concentrated to crystallize. Boiled crystals. and molasses mixtures are called sugar paste. After the sugar paste is removed, it is cooled and cooled to make the precipitation of sucrose more complete, and the original and crystallization continue to grow, this process is the crystallization. The sugar paste after crystallization is separated from molasses by a high-speed rotary centrifuge, and the separated white sugar is then dried and sieved to obtain a certain specification of product, which becomes the finished white sugar.

The sugar masters invited by Fujian were stunned!

Chen Zhenji said with a smile: "Do you understand why we gave you such a high price and asked you to move your family to the Southeast Mansion?" ”

"If our sugar making process is spread, find out who said it, it is for rebellion, killing heads, and family slaves!" Chen Xinji said sternly.

The masters are only the only ones, and it is a pity that this method cannot make them rich.

The charcoal is not ordinary charcoal, this is activated carbon!

If you look at activated carbon with a microscope, it looks like a black "honeycomb", full of holes and a large surface area. Substances with a large surface area have the property that they can attract other things.

The surface area of activated carbon is very large, and the ability to "grasp" molecules is particularly strong. In brown sugar water, because the pigmented substances are always large and heavy, when "passing" the surface of activated carbon, it is like an elephant sinking into a quagmire, and it is most likely to be "caught" by bone charcoal. Since the activated carbon adsorbs the pigment, as soon as the activated carbon is filtered and removed, the filtrate will be colorless, and the brown sugar will become white sugar.

Due to the large solid particles of activated carbon, it is naturally filtered better than yellow mud, and the resulting white sugar looks super good!

Southeast Province uses widely cultivated coconut shells to make activated carbon, the method comes from Yan Changwu, when he was a geography editor, he once did a program (all over the country) ancient method of sugar, including China, as well as Cuba, Yamaijia, clear about the whole process of sugar production!

The centrifuge is hydraulically driven, and the activated carbon soil method is physically activated, which does not require chemical activation, and can be produced in the current environment.

Make persistent efforts to produce rock sugar:

White sugar is a beautiful white crystal, but it also contains some water, and the crystals are relatively small. Rock candy is "to the next level". If you remove the water from the sugar, you can get a large colorless crystal - rock sugar. Our country will make rock sugar very early,

There are several ways to make rock candy, such as:

Traditional soil boiling process:

First, dissolve sugar (the ratio of sugar and water is 10:2.5), boil, purify with egg water (about 5kg of water for 1 egg), and then filter from the pot;

Re-boil sugar: After the syrup is purified and filtered, it is returned to the pot to boil to about 105 degrees, and the syrup is dropped into a bowl of cold water.

Then make raw ice: use a metal bucket or metal box bowl with a large mouth and a small bottom as a container. Two bamboos (wooden strips) are placed at the mouth of the container cross, and four hemp ropes are symmetrically tied on the bamboo strips, perpendicular to the container, and the hemp rope can be tied to the end of the hemp thread in order to make the hemp rope vertical. Once the container is ready, pour the syrup into the container. Pile up the chaff around the container, cover it with paper or cloth, and cover it with the chaff, more in winter and less in summer, to meet the needs of the raw ice temperature;

Finally, the ice is out: the syrup is held in the container for 7 days (can not vibrate, that is, crystallized into rock sugar, when out of the ice, first remove the covering and chaff on the container, scoop off the bottom ice near the crystal, turn the container upside down on the cylinder with a wooden frame, drip the remaining water, tap the container around and the bottom with a wooden stick, and the rock sugar can be taken out.

There is also a hanging wire process, the pure sugar is dissolved into a saturated and thick sugar solution, and then injected into the barrel or barrel container, and the cotton line is hung in the barrel (according to the size of the barrel to arrange different cotton, after about 1 week, a lot of rock sugar (commonly known as column ice) will grow (crystallized) on the line, and at the same time, some crystalline rock sugar will be formed on the edge of the barrel, and the finished product will be obtained after washing and drying.

Rock sugar comes from white sugar, and the white sugar from the southeast province is good, and the quality of rock sugar is also rising, which is quite good.

……

In the warehouse, Yan Changwu and Chen Xinji inspected, saw barrels of white sugar piled up on the top of the warehouse, walked all the way, walked back to the warehouse door, Chen Xinji asked a little worriedly: "Can those red-haired fans eat so much sucrose from us?" “

As soon as the words fell, a half-hard Chinese came from outside: "CEO Chen, for white sugar, we can collect as much as we want!" ”