Under the Choko Tree By Nevin Sweeney

Sugar Beet - A sweet alternative

The basic idea of being self reliant is to produce as much of your needs as you can from your own resources, and as a result you will also be living more sustainably. I decided that in my backyard I wanted to produce some of the staples that we use such as sugar, oil and flour; just to see if it was possible.

In western Sydney where I live it does not get hot enough for long enough grow sugar cane and get a decent yield of sugar out of it, and believe me I have tried! In Europe however, they have been producing sugar for almost two hundred years using the humble sugar beet, so I decided to try the same trick.

Cultivation

The seed is available from Eden Seeds in Queensland and from what I have read the beets can yield up to 18% sugar and should be grown as you would a standard beet. I sowed the seed much as I do for beetroot and into a similar position but it seemed to me that the sugar beet took a longer time to grow into harvestable size. I made no special provisions for the sugar beet, just sowed the seed and left them to it, but i think that a higher percentage of sugar would be obtained if the beets were given a bit more nurturing.

According to the books, beets can be grown on most soils but do best on soils that are deep with good structure and a moist but well drained (mind you what wouldn’t grow well under those circumstances?). The soil pH should be between 6 and 7 and the seeds should be sown 12 millimetres deep with a spacing of seven to ten centimetres between plants and 20 to 30 centimetres between rows, assuming you plant in the traditional row format. Although in a truly fertile organic garden I think that some poetic license could be used with these distances and plants sown closer together.

Extracting the Sugar

The beets are harvested by pulling them out of the ground then cutting off the leafy tops which can then be composted, fed to livestock or eaten by yourself if you have a mind to. Now that you have your pile of freshly harvested beets the next job is to clean them up to remove the outside dirt.

To do this I first washed the beets off then scrubbed them with a toothbrush to remove as much dirt as I could, which was an interesting way to kill an evening, but would get very tedious of there were a large amount of beets to be cleaned. An alternative way would be to peel them but I knew it would be a few days before i would be able to process them so I elected to use the scrub method so that they would keep longer.

When the beets are squeaky clean the extraction process can be started in earnest. I cut each beet into slices about three to six millimetres thick across the “grain” and then thrown into a pot, my four kilograms of beets filled our stainless steel four litre pot to just overflowing. I then poured in one litre of cold water, covered the pot and applied the heat. The whole mess then proceeded to simmer for about an hour. While it simmered it gave off the penetrating odour of cooking beetroot, no surprise in that, but it did prompt complaints from some members of the family so be aware of possibilities in this area.

Once the beets had finished simmering I attacked them with a potato masher to release the juice, I poured off 750 millilitres of juice and added another litre of water and re-boiled the whole lot. In retrospect I would say that the second litre of water wasn’t needed, it would have been better just to put more effort into squeezing out any remaining juice. I then poured off the second lot of liquid getting about a litre back. I then scooped out the beet mush (sounds appetising don’t it?) onto some fine cloth and squeezed the living daylights out of it, along with the rest of the remaining juice. I then poured the entire amount of liquid (about two and a half litres) back into the pot through four layers of cloth to act as a filter and proceeded to boil off the excess water.

At this point the beet sugar solution gave a passable impression of muddy water and as such came close to being poured down the drain. Fortunately my lovely partner in the sustainable life is well aware of some of the less palatable aspects of some of my projects s she thought she better ask first, thus saving herself from learning some new words.
The two and a half litres took a couple of hours to boil down to about 400 millilitres with a sugar content of close to 50%. The concentrate was dark brown to almost black on colour, tastes very sweet but with a raw sugar/”beety” aftertaste and a distinctly beety aroma. I left it to stand for a week or so to let any remaining vegetable matter that made it through the filter settle out. The sugar syrup could probable be used in this form if you didn’t mind the aftertaste, particularly in cooking. If the aftertaste gets to you it can be processed further.

A bottle of Beety Goodness!

The syrup can be made more palatable by mixing in some activated charcoal (available from chemists), given a bit of time to react then being filtered out. Home produced charcoal could be used and would have a similar effect if ground up finely but would be less efficient so you would need to use more. I added the activated charcoal at a rate of three grams per litre of syrup then left it for 24 hours and filtered it out. This is no mean feat as the commercial activated charcoal is very fine and some particles get through several layers of even the finest cloth. The result was a reduction in the beety aroma and aftertaste.

Improving the System

It never ceases to amaze me how information on how to do something always turns up after the something is finished! After the sugar had been processed I was reading John and Sally Seymour’s book, Self Sufficiency (Faber and Faber 1984). On page 167 they say the following about sugar beet – “To make sugar yourself, chop the beet up as small as you can, boil the pulp, run the water off and boil the water away, first mixing lime with it and passing carbon dioxide through the solution. Unrefined sugar will be left as crystals”. So there you have it!

In hindsight, and bearing the above comments in mind I think the following ideas would improve the quality and quantity of the end product –

  • Provide the best growing conditions for the beet that you can,
  • Don’t cut the beets up, grate them,
  • Add only the minimum of water so there is less that has to be removed during later processing,
  • Heat the sugar solution up as least as you can, warm it rather than boil it. I think that too much heat caramelises some of the sugar, darkening the product and adding a hint of bitterness.
  • Try the lime/carbon dioxide method recommended by the Seymours.

Next time we’ll see if we can come up with a product that CSR would be proud of!

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