On Food and Cooking

evaporation stage to heat the next.
The initial clarification of cane and beet
juice is now accomplished without eggs or
blood; heat and lime are generally used to
coagulate and remove proteins and other
impurities. Rather than waiting for gravity to
draw off molasses, refiners use centrifuges,
which spin the raw sugar as a salad spinner
spins greens, forcing the liquid off the crystals
in minutes rather than weeks. The sucrose is
whitened by the technique of decolorization,
in which granular carbon — a material like
activated charcoal that can absorb undesirable
molecules on its large surface area — is added
to the centrifuged, redissolved sugar. After it
absorbs the last remaining impurities, the
charcoal is filtered out. The final
crystallization process is carefully controlled
to give individual sugar crystals of uniform
size. Our table sugar is an astonishingly pure
99.85% sucrose.