Making your Own Sugar

  You can just make your own sugar. 'Naked in the woods,' if you wish.



  The first thing you will need is a sugar source. If you live where sugar cane grows wild, that's great! If you have a batch of fruits which are very sweet, but the flavor isn't much, this is a good stock. There are these things called "sugar beets" one can grow. The sap of the birch tree provides a very sweet syrup which is probably better as syrup, but you can, and not only the sugar maple, but also the bigleaf maple Acer macrophyllum, are syrup-producing.

  When one has a sugar source one isn't using for other things, one will have to purify it. A three-part process should suffice...

 • Float a little grease or vegetable oil on it to defat it. Shake very well. This will remove plant waxes and other fat-soluble things, and leave the sugar.

 • Run it through a food-grade chalk or crushed seashell, both of which are calcium carbonate. This will remove most acids, and almost all calcium salts are essentially insoluble. Heating the used calcium source in a fire will yield calcium oxide (lime), which works as well and allows reuse, but is caustic.

 • Run it through charcoal. Commercial charcoal will not do, as it has chemicals added which poison its natural use, and the activated charcoal sold for fish filters is made from mineral coal, and tends to have heavy metal contaminants. You will need actual charcoal from a campfire or similar.

  Charcoal ("activated charcoal," since it was likely smothered with quite a bit of CO2 and CO at sufficient temperature) has a vast, open cage-like structure which is famed as a molecular absorbent.

  Being devoid of fats, waxes, acids, and whatever can be filtered by activated charcoal, you now have a much purer source stock. Recrystallization is now the next step in purification. Boil the thing down to half its volume and see if some white crystals drop out when it cools, or use a slower, evaporative recrystallization for large, slow growth. You can also dangle a thread (of natural fiber) into the broth and grow large crystals thusly, grinding them later.



  Furrther purification can be had from recrystalization from a cleaner water, recrystallization from ethanol, and the like.

  You can pump out fine white crystalline sugar from commonly-available sources any time you like.


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