When Zhao Dagui returned home, he found that his younger brother and sister had really bought rice noodles and pork, and pulled a lot of vegetables from the vegetable field behind the house.

The three of them ate a delicious meal, and then put the sugar given by the Chen family into the water to make sugar water to drink.

Zhao Xiaohu and Zhao Xiaomei are children after all, and they laughed when they ate well, and they had long forgotten Huo Daya's debt collection.

Zhao Dagui instructed his younger brothers and sisters to take good care of the house, and then went out again and crossed the river to the county seat again.

When he went to the county seat for the first time, because he was worried that the secret would be exposed, Zhao Dagui didn't buy a lot of things that should be bought, and he had to buy them all secretly at this time.

First, I looked for a pharmacy and asked about bone char.

In this era, bone char is still a medicine, it seems to be used to treat diarrhea, every pharmacy will carry some, the price is not expensive, a load is only five cents to a penny of silver, and I directly bought a load of one hundred catties.

After that, I went to the grocery store to buy tiles and barrels for sugar making.

To put it bluntly, it is a large funnel, but in this era, because there is no plastic, iron is reluctant to use, so it is made of pottery, which is widely used in sugar making, salt boiling, oil refining, rice vinegar, etc., and the price is naturally not expensive, and one is only a few dozen dollars.

Zhao Dagui felt that he was wealthy, so he bought five tiles and two wooden barrels, and together with the bone charcoal, it took a long time to carry and pull to the dock, or cross the river as usual and take them home.

Running back and forth to the county seat twice in one day, and taking a lot of things, plus his body was not completely good, Zhao Dagui felt a little tired at night.

However, there are now dozens of taels of silver usury outside, and Zhao Dagui can't just rest, and after dinner, he commanded his younger brothers and sisters to clean the iron pot at home, preparing to boil coarse brown sugar into white refined sugar.

The principle of turning brown sugar or brown sugar into white sugar is extremely simple, and it is very easy to do, basically anyone who has not taken a nap in junior high school chemistry class knows that there is no need to use the big killer weapon of the main god library at all.

Zhao Dagui still remembers a chemistry experiment in junior high school, where the chemistry teacher (not dead, it's good) filled a glass flask with water, then put brown sugar in it, and stirred it with a glass rod to make it completely dissolved.

The reason why brown sugar is red is because the sugar contains a large number of impurities, and after being put into a flask to make brown sugar water, a large number of impurities are in the solution, and the brown sugar water is naturally turbid and red.

Then, the chemistry teacher puts a small amount of bone char into the flask and shakes it, the impurities in the brown sugar aqueous solution will be adsorbed by the bone char particles, and the whole solution will gradually be clarified, leaving only some bone char particles that adsorb impurities at the bottom.

Make a funnel with filter paper (many people have played with it), pour the brown sugar aqueous solution in the flask, and put another flask under the filter paper funnel, and then the bone char and other impurities will remain on the filter paper, and there will only be clear and transparent sugar water in the other flask.

Finally, the flask is heated on an alcohol lamp to evaporate all the water, and at the bottom of the flask you can get white crystals, which are commonly known as white sugar.

Therefore, the key to turning brown sugar into white sugar is to use the adsorption properties of bone char to remove the impurities in the brown sugar water, and then evaporate the water like boiling salt to obtain white sugar particles;

Therefore, the local method of sugar refining in the Qing Dynasty in China is that the last step has not been stepped out, and the yellow mud water is poured with brown sugar to go further, that is, the brown sugar water is clarified with yellow mud water, and then the clear sugar water is re-boiled, and the water is evaporated, and the clean white refined sugar can be obtained in batches, and the quality and sugar yield are much higher than that of yellow mud water and brown sugar.

However, modern people do not have to think that the Qing Dynasty's sugar refining methods are too backward, such a backward yellow mud water refining white sugar method, Nanyang countries have not been able to master, take Vietnam as an example, itself is rich in sugarcane and red sugar, but does not master any method of producing white sugar, until the middle of the 19th century, are in a large number of exports of red sugar at the same time from the Qing State to import white sugar, and even the Qing Dynasty of white sugar is how much to import, the use of very preferential import tax rates.

Europe did not master the production method of white sugar in the Middle Ages, and even the price of brown sugar was extremely expensive, and it was only after the popularization of the first industrial revolution that the mechanism of white sugar production was studied around the 18th century, and on the basis of sugarcane sugar production, sugar beet and other sugar production technologies were also developed, and sugar production technology was quite perfect in the forties of the 19th century.

In 1878, the fourth year of Guangxu of the Qing Dynasty, the British Jardine Matheson established the "China Refined Sugar Company" in Hong Kong, specializing in purchasing Chinese brown sugar to produce white sugar, which can process 4,000 quintals of brown sugar per day, and in 1880, opened a branch factory in Jiaoshi, Shantou, Guangdong.

Subsequently, the British company Swire & Co. also established the Swire Sugar Company in Hong Kong, specializing in the purchase of local brown sugar to produce white sugar.

This kind of sugar refinery established by Westerners is to buy cheap local brown sugar from China, then use bone char adsorption to remove impurities, and then re-cook to produce snow-white sugar.

However, in this way, China's sugar craftsmen, until 1878 or even 1880, did not grasp the theory of turning brown sugar into white sugar, so that foreigners took a lot of advantage out of thin air.

Alas, it's all tears.

Without further ado, Zhao Dagui washed the iron pot, wooden barrel and tile slip with clean water, and put the grass and wood ashes made of fresh straw into the iron pot, poured a large bucket of water for boiling, and finally used the water boiled from straw to wash the tile slip and the wooden bucket again, which was considered to have completed the cleaning and disinfection work.

The aqueous solution made of fresh straw burned plant ash is a very powerful disinfectant, Zhao Dagui commanded Zhao Xiaohu and Zhao Xiaomei to use grass ash water to scrub the bed, table, pots and pans, etc., not to mention.

Once this preparation is over, it's time to start making sugar.

Zhao Dagui found a wooden bucket, poured water and filled half of it, and then put in two or three catties of jaggery bought from the Chen family.

Then, Zhao Dagui put in half a catty of bone charcoal, and stirred vigorously with a rolling pin, stirring vigorously for a long time, only to find that the water gradually became clear.

Zhao Xiaohu and Zhao Xiaomei didn't know what was going on, and they screamed, thinking that the sugar in it had run away.

Zhao Dagui didn't care about them, took out a clean homespun cloth, and poured the water in the wooden bucket into the iron pot through the homespun cloth.

At this time, there is no filter paper available, so it can only be replaced by homespun cloth, but fortunately, as long as the bone char particles are prevented from entering the iron pot, there is no difficulty.

Then, light a fire on the stove and burn the fire.

Zhao Dagui volunteered to use a fire sickle and flint to light the fire himself, but he couldn't get it right after trembling a few times, and he was very affected by the white eyes of his younger brothers and sisters several times.

After the fire was burned, it was just a fan to fan the fire and add firewood at the same time, and there was no technical skill to speak of, so Comrade Zhao Xiaohu took over.

However, Zhao Dagui secretly shook his head, this blower has to rely on a fan, that is, the hand-turned wooden blowers that I have seen in the countryside before are all considered artifacts here, and it seems that I have to find a carpenter to make it as soon as possible.

When the younger brothers and sisters came to master the heat, Zhao Dagui stared at the iron pot, and wanted to wait until the water was almost dry and the sugar crystals were precipitated little by little, and then scraped it out with a turning spoon made of wood chips and put it aside.

Theoretically, the precipitated white sugar crystals are put on the tile slip and the water is drained by itself, and finally the delicate and white sand sugar can be obtained.

A veteran who has been working in the sugar liao for a long time also uses the scraped white sugar to make white sugar bricks directly, but with such a tall skill, Lord Zhao will definitely not be able to.

Zhao Dagui stared at the iron pot and operated it carefully, for fear that something would go wrong, and then this first batch of sugar... It's mushy.

This sugar water is boiled to the back, the water is very small, and the sugar will be burned if you are not careful, so you must master this degree, and take out the condensed white sugar sooner or later, and put it in the tile to dry.

Zhao Dagui was not discouraged, and then configured a second pot of sugar water, continued to boil water, and then... Scorched again.

Zhao Dagui lacked more than a dozen pots of water before and after, and tried many times before he slowly mastered the timing, heat and speed of taking sugar, etc., and consciously felt that the experience value of sugar refining was rising, but it was a pity that it could not be seen on the main god library.

After trying so many times, Zhao Dagui recorded the proportion of raw sugar, water and bone char every time, but he calculated the proportion of sugar water clearly, and gradually gained experience in how to take sugar, and it was no longer the initial rush.

After a busy night, Zhao Dagui finally scraped out about twenty catties of white sugar crystals, then put them on the tile slip, and blocked the bottom of the tile slip with clean hay.

In this way, the water on the white sugar crystals will gradually flow out from below, and finally you can get a clean white refined sugar.

Zhao Dagui took out the white sugar given by the Chen family and compared it with the white sugar he refined, only to see that although the white sugar of the Chen family was also white, it had a little yellow color (yellow muddy water), and it was somewhat impurities;

Zhao Xiaohu and Zhao Xiaomei are both sensible, yawning and urging Zhao Dagui to continue making sugar, but Zhao Dagui felt that Rome was still built in a day, so he announced that today is over, everyone must go back to the house to rest first, and wait until tomorrow to continue to work.