Sugar

A sweetener that is most often made from processed sugar cane and sugar beets. Also referred to by its chemical name, sucrose, sugar is produced in many different forms such as granulated or white sugar, which have been highly refined and are most commonly used as a table sweetner or as a baking ingredient. When a recipe specifies sugar, it is best to use the granulated white sugar. Sugar is available in different textures, such as super-fine, confectioner's or powdered sugar, decorating or coarse, and brown sugar. Other forms of sugar include maple sugar, sorghum, fructose, glucose, lactose, and maltose. Sugar is used most often as a sweetener, but it can be useful for other purposes including to make dough tender and to add stability to mixtures, such as meringue. BEWARE '''Cane sugar is white because the color has been removed by a refining process involving the use of bone char, which is made from cattle bones. The sun-bleached bones are first used by the gelatin industry, then sold to sugar manufacturers. The bones are heated at a high temperature until they become pure carbon. The resulting bone char is used to remove impurities but does not become part of the sugar. Beet sugar, however, does not require extensive decoloring, so it is never passed through a bone-char filter.

'''Many sugars that may seem not to have been refined, such as raw sugar, brown sugar and powdered sugar, are no less animal-derived than white sugar. Brown sugar is usually simply white sugar combined with molasses to give it color, unlike turbinado sugar, which has a natural light brown color'''