Thread: cane vs. beet sugar
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pure kona pure kona is offline
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Default cane vs. beet sugar
On Sat, 25 Apr 2009 10:40:57 GMT, (Phred)
wrote:

>In article >, "Bob Terwilliger" > wrote:
>>Cindy wrote:
>
>Back in primary school days we kids of mill staff spent a lot of time
>wandering around in the mill (imagine doing that now with WPH&S and
>all and helping ourselves to a slurp or two of liquor [juice from
>the evaporators prior to crystallisation] from a sampling tap, as well
>as grabbing handfulls of raw sugar from the endless chain of elevator
>buckets that took the raw sugar up to the bagging machine hopper from
>where it had been dropped under the fugals after centrifuging. The
>warm freshly made raw sugar was delicious and had a great aroma! :-)
>
>Also, back in those days it was legal for the mills to sell some sugar
>each year to the farmers who supplied cane to the mill -- may have
>been restricted to one bag (160 lb) per farm or per farm family. The
>mill I knew made a special batch once a year for this purpose. It was
>"washed" a little more than usual in the fugals to remove more of the
>residual molasses and was referred to as "mill white" sugar. Not
>Persil white, but a lot paler than the normal raw sugar!
>
>>Nowadays I just use whatever seems to best give me the taste I'm after.
>
>Very shrewd of you. ;-)
>
>Cheers, Phred.

Aloha Phred, fellow sugar plantation person--- and we must be
becoming a rarer breed. Not many sugar plantations left in Hawaii- 2,
I think.

The memories, you evoked, of walking through the very noisy sugar
mill, smelling the crushers extracting the juices (I still remember
that luscious smell of cane juice, water,mud and warmth-somehow) -
watching the centrifugal machine separate most of the molasses from
the sugar, and yes--the endless conveyor belt taking the warm yummy
sugar up to be bagged---and then sent off, in our case to California.
(Hence the name C(California) & H(Hawaii) Agreed, grabbing that sugar
off the conveyor belt would give you odd bits of unknown things. But
boy!! was it so tasty and such all around fun.

aloha,
Cea
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