OK, I have NO experience with Sugar beets but, some experience with making candy, and even more experience with Maple syrup. After pressing, I would have added a bit of boiling water, strained through a coffee filter, and rinsed that with boiling water too. I think the variation in the recipes you've read are people using the Rock Candy method, which uses sugar to seed the crystallization process, and others using the Maple Sugar process, which does not. Personally I would use the Maple Sugar process. Boil Syrup to 160F (use a candy thermometer!) Then, using an old school double paddle hand blender on high, mix in the pan (off the heat) until it turns to sugar, may take a 1/2 an hour, depending on humidity... super easy... I can guarantee it works for Maple Syrup > Sugar.
Just a quick tip, apparently sugar beets lose sugar after they are harvested, (they're still alive in the beginning & using their stored energy) so the sooner you process them the more sugar you'll get
Oh that is an awesome tip. Thank you so much. We are always terribly behind to do everything, but we are getting there. We should do it as an experiment as we haven't processed the harvest from 2021. We should do 2022 harvest right away and see if it makes a difference.
@@HickorycroftFarm Thats a great idea! I just got on a late night research rabbit hole on how to make sugar from sugar beets & learned that on a 'how its made' video about how the commercial companies do it 😂
We are going to try doing 10 or 15 lbs now and next harvest try the same weight right away and see if there is a difference. Kind of excited to try it. Thanks for the idea lol.
Great video! One suggestion for grinding your sugar crystals is to use a pepper mill or a grain mill. It will work much better! Keep up the great work! Have a better day!
That's a good idea (we never thought of that one). Easy enough to do and it would do a good job of it to. We will have to try that with this years sugar!
I got here while researching food preservation. I think the syrup would work for making jelly or jam. With my luck I'll probably find the perfect method for ruining sugar beets AND plums 😁
We haven't experimented with it but its likely it would with a bit of tweaking. The only thing we would wonder is about how it would set (i.e. would you need more pectin etc.). It's something to play around with for sure though! We are looking forward to this winter and processing our sugar beets from the 2021 growing season. All and all it was not that hard to do. Not sure if you came across it but we also did a video this year on making syrup from Mennonite sorghum and it also turned out pretty good (another plant more people should probably think about growing). We are certainly glad you found us though food preservation is an important part of growing food that is for sure!
A different video I watched on making sugar used an electric hand blender while the syrup was still hot, to cool and break it up into granules. It was for condensed maple syrup and not sugar beets, but it could be worth a shot.
It worked quite well and was relatively easy to do. Definitely areas to improve and we are hoping for good results with this years harvest 😃. Thanks for watching
It's pretty neat to make a sweetener out of sugar beets at home. Certainly, if you don't have maple trees for maple syrup, it is a great way to make some sugar or syrups at home!
It was fun, and potentially something that could end up very useful one day. We are planting a big patch of sugar beets this season so hopefully great results on the next try.
Very interesting. Thinking of you guys during this week of bad weather. Please stay safe, warm, and healthy. Thank you for sharing! Hugs and love to you and your family my friends. ❤️✝🤗 Have a beautiful and blessed week. ❤️✝🤗
Thank you so much! We have been quite fortunate and most of the bad stuff has really missed us. But our thoughts are definitely with all those that are struggling right now.
Pop the bigger crystals into a coffee grinder. Small batches in a small coffee grinder will give you a more even finished product. A very cool experiment. I’ll be giving it a try once I move.
Great idea! We wondered about a grinder. The beets are growing very very well this year so we are excited to try again, and make the syrup as well. Thank you so much for watching and commenting.
@@HickorycroftFarm yes it will definitely work. In the food processor those bigger pieces are just flying around at the top and not coming into contact with the blades. In a coffee grinder that won’t happen because of the smaller bowl and slightly different shape. The blades are a different shape too. It’s designed to take small amounts of hard things and grind to a powder. A food processor is designed to chop larger amounts. You’ll have to do lots of little batches in the coffee grinder which might get annoying if you have lots this year. In that case I would try the food processor first. It might do a better job if it’s almost full. If you leave a full food processor running with powders in it (which it will turn the shards to at the bottom) you will actually start to see it turning the contents over. The bits on top fall into the vortex created by the blades and get incorporated. I make a huge batch of hot chocolate mix for my mum every year for Mother’s Day. She has one every night so I made her a gourmet version lol. That has cocoa and sugar and milk powder that start off in layers and as it runs I can see the top bits falling inside, but also can see the mixed bits rising. I let it turn everything over twice as I’m mixing more than grinding and I want a fine powder. It runs for a good 8 or so minutes straight to turn it all over so you need to be sure you have a food processor that can handle that. (Check out some of Noreen’s Kitchens hot chocolate videos. I didn’t use her recipe but I got the food processor method from her and in a couple of her vids you can see it turning over so you’ll know what I’m talking about and will get a sense of how long it needs to run). With sugar you should be able to see the shards falling in and the granulated sugar rising up. You would want to check it as you go to make sure it’s not becoming too fine a powder on the bottom. It could be like confectioners sugar rather than granulated sugar. The coffee grinder would give more control and if you did overdo it and get confectioners sugar it would only be that small grinderful, not the whole batch. Also with the food processor even if it works for the bulk of it you will get to a point where there are shards left but if you keep going to chop them you’ll overdo the rest of it so then you’ll want to sift out the chunky bits and do them in a coffee grinder. So, after all of that lol, if you do have enough to fill the food processor, I think it really comes down to do you trust it to do the job, and if it dies trying can you either live without it or afford to replace it immediately. If you can’t, maybe multiple little batches in a cheap coffee grinder is a much safer option. Oh, another food processor trick you could try with the bigger bits is to have the empty food processor running and drop a couple of pieces at a time through the chute. It works with chocolate chips. Might work with sugar bits. It’s another thing I picked up from Noreen. It’s very noisy lol, but it does chop them up way better than putting them in the bowl first.
@@moniquem783 awesome! We will take a look at her videos. We love fresh ground coffee lol, but have always ground it at the store. We think it is time to just buy the grinder.
@@HickorycroftFarm once you have one you’ll find it comes in handy for lots of things. Spices etc are great in it. You could even do small amounts of wheat berries or dried corn to make cornmeal. If you can find one with a removable bowl/cup it makes washing up much easier than the regular ones as you can throw it in the sink or dishwasher with the rest of the dishes and clean it thoroughly. The regular ones you can only wipe it out with a soft cloth around the sharp blades which isn’t fun, particularly if you want to clean it thoroughly so you can put a different spice in it.
All in all, I would call it a success. It's like anything else related to growing your food---you never stop learning and figuring out better ways to grow and process the food.
A coffee grinder will get you to the consistency of sugar, also when boiling it down if you get it to 130•F - 55.4 C while still hot take a hand mixer and mix to sugar it may take a while but it will turn to sugar as it cooks while mixing
The coffee grinder is something we have added to the kitchen (two actually!) and it was just something we didn't have at the time we put this video together. But it does make a big difference (and you can turn so many other things into powders etc. as well!)
Thanks for stopping in to watch Mal. It was a very fun experiment. It is also nice to know that in a crisis situation... if there ever was one that involved no sugar, we would be good lol.
As a kid the last load of beets of the season came to my uncles yard and we spent days peeling, chopping and cooking beets to beet syrup. I miss those days
What a wonderful memory! Thank you for watching and sharing. We really enjoyed the syrup and find it more useful in our cooking needs then the sugar. It has such a great flavor.
Watched this to figure out how to make sugar so I can make ethanol so I can make biodiesel. You will have helped me greatly in the process so thank you.
That is an interesting application and I'm sure it would work well! I do have some friends who have talked about making biodiesel but its not something we know a lot about.
So...I was singing the song Sugartown in my head and got this great idea to make my own sugar from beets. I will try this but I will try to speed this process up with my food dehydrator. Along with the cooked beet portion. I have a vitamix to chop it finer later. Excited! Thank you for your video!!! And thank you Nancy Sinatra for that fun song.
That is a fitting song for processing sugar beets! Hopefully the dehydrator helps speed up the process. We don't have a vita mix but if they chop finer than a normal food processor it might work really well.
I was curious about making my own sugar. That is a great video. I think I will try it my self. I will be using the maple syrup method. The silicone ice cube tray sounds like a good idea. I might try that too.
Sugar beets are certainly another great way to make sugar and we highly recommend growing them (its a positive redundancy if you have other sugar sources such as maple syrup!). We should try the maple syrup method of turning it into sugar (will try that with the 2021 crop we still have to process). The trays worked as a first attempt but you do have to "seed" it with sugar granules so the other method would likely be better.
Exactly! Even if we don't actually produce all our sugar needs, it is nice to have the skill and the seeds to do so if we choose. We only grew a small amount this year, but we are looking forward to fine tuning our methods. Thanks so much for watching.
Since we did this video, we have progressed to using a coffee grinder for a lot of things (including this), and it does work well! The dehydrator may work to that's not something we have tried yet to be honest.
We have sugar maples on our place an we made syrup a while back. I figured we got 4-5 table spoon per gallon of sap. Yep, was not worth getting out of bed for. It was fun and we did get some quality free time so no big loss.
It was a great project to do so that we knew we could. It is great to have the ability to be able to make these products in a crisis situation. We are curious to try making the syrup this year, stopping there rather then taking it to the sugar stage. There is something satisfying about producing our own products, but realistically it is just to supplement what we purchase :)
Really nice video, thank you. And to explain the crystal thing. Crystals grow fasted from an existing lattice. You can see the difference. Take two pots of water, put them in your freezer, and once they are pretty cold, put an ice cube in one of them. It will 'freeze' much faster than the one without the ice cube.
That does make sense it's like you say freezing water will often freeze around an object and as the crystals form they all attach. Glad you enjoyed the video! the sugar beets are an interesting addition to the homestead!
Thanks for the video! Honestly, I’d just use it in the larger chunks. Most recipes would allow you to dissolve it in whatever liquid the recipe called for. Thanks again! I learned a lot!
Glad you enjoyed it! Since we did this video, we even find leaving it as a syrup works well for 99% of what we tend to use sugar in (not great for all kinds of baking, but...), which cuts down on the last few steps. We just wanted to see if we could do it and it was a fun experiment to try taking it to that granulated "sugar" like state.
I know that vitamin C can be used to help whiten foods. I've added it to my apples once to try.. worked great trying to make sauce and experimenting for pectin content. I enjoyed seeing the process as I was thinking of growing sweet sorghum for grain and sugar..
We have never tried adding vitamin C to anything before, we may have to look into that! This was a neat experiment and we are set to scale it up a bit this year (and actually need to look at getting the beets planted soon to make the most of it). We to are going to try sorghum as another experiment this year, we figure it can't hurt to diversify on the sugar production! We have some Mennonite sorghum seeds to try (we have grown sorghum before but never this variety) so looking forward to that project to!
@@HickorycroftFarm hi I'm from New Zealand and found this very interesting. It's just past mid summer here, so I will try growing some sugarbeet this year. Forgetting about your beets is the sort of thing I would do, so I had a little chuckle about that, but the way they shrunk would have just consentrated the sugar content so no harm done. I love to experiment, and have been thinking about the grated pulp that was left over, what did you do with it? My first thought was feed it to the chickens, or maybe compost it, now I'm wondering if it would be a good idea to add more water, like lots of water and make some kind of liquid fertilzer for the garden, perhaps even something like a fermented JADAM style plant food. Did you grow more sugarbeet this year? I guess if you did, it will be about another 3 months before you harvest wouldn't it?
Great job! We just really want to taste the sugar. It looks really delicious. I wonder what the percentage would have been had they been fresher? It will be really cool to see how you do with them next season!
Thanks so much! Not sure if it would have been better or not, they would have only lost moisture really (that 8s out guess) I think the percentage would have been higher if people hadn't kept "trying" it lol. Can't wait to see how it goes next time.
As soon as you said 3 lbs. 14 oz., I thought about the fact that I was born at 2 lbs. 14 oz. Now you just moved to throwing me into the food blender and I’m grossed out 4:07 😂. I started joking about my addiction to sugar when I’ve been able to quit everything else in life. I’m like what do I do if the world goes to heck? So I came over here to learn how to make sure in case it runs out through the regular sources. 😂. I’m eating a giant pack of sweet tarts I just had delivered. 😅. They now make them the size of a roll of Tums, like you would get in a bottle. If I were you, I would be running around the house right now but at almost 60, not so much. Food processor to modern. I’m getting a mortar and pestal : ) 16:36 sorry I was 20 seconds too early😂. All the really paint stuff gets used as cinnamon sugar. 😂
That lumpier stuff looks ideal for coffee. You could probably sell it as a product. I'd sparge the pulp with hot water, the way brewers extract sugar from grain.
We have learned so much from the comments on this video. We are really looking forward to our harvest this year and fine tuning our sugar making skills 😃
It is nice just to know that we have options. We would love to do Maple syrup one day too. And it was relatively simple and we did it with stuff that we had around the house... granted, we need a better way to grind it. The beets were just a generic sugar beet that we were able to order online. This year we are hoping to save our own seed from our own saved beets... fingers crossed. I know MIgardener sells them, we originally got our ones in Canada from Salt Spring Seeds, but they no longer carry them.
Always good to know multiple self-sufficiency skills; however, I'm thinking this is really labor intensive and time-consuming compared to my stevia (easy to grow, easy to dry/powder, and useable right off the plant). Great experiment, though! 🌵
Oh yes, we grow stevia as well and love it. Always dry lots for winter use as it is hard for us to grow it year round, but we have been successful cloning it to have new plants for the next garden season. One of the main reasons we are choosing to still do the sugar beets is for canning purposes, for jams, jellies and things like that. It is nice to have multiple sources for things to help build our resilience and sustainability. Thank you so much for watching.
That is a great idea. We didn't have one last year but now have an old cast food mill we could likely use as well. Its certainly all a good learning curve. We do want to get a proper grain mill though in the future so could see that working quite well to!
Hickorycroft Farm I understand. We saved for almost two years to get ours but now we use it for everything. Corn, coffee, sugar, nut butter. We even used it to crack some mustard seed for creole mustard. Get the best quality you can afford and it will pay for itself.
Hey you guys we saw a video from a couple in Canada who bottled their own maple syrup and we watched him cook a jar if his syrup down and whip it with a hand mixer and it turned to sugar in the hot pan! They had a big rubber bin of sugar they made. I will send you the link to that video. We are working with sygar cane juice we press from canes ourselves but the process whether its beet juice, cane juice or maple syrup is the same.
From what I have read, the crystals are grown while the batch is still wet. This is then put in a centrifuge where the dark liquid is removed from the white crystals.
This is so cool. My brother used to buy sugar beets by the ton in the fall to feed the deer. He would leave them outside to freeze because he said it made them sweeter. His were big I don’t know if it because where they grew, in the north. I’ll have to try this next fall when they become available again. I wonder if a bit of lemon juice in the water would prevent the darkening. Great fun! Thanks for sharing. ☮️-Kirsten
Thanks Kirsten. I (Steph) used to live out west and piles of beets was not an uncommon sight, but I never thought about it. Ours should have grow a lot larger, but we were very late planting them, so then they battled with dry conditions and.... well tons of excuses lol. Bottom line is that this year we are planning to do much better with them now that we know it can result in the sugar. I am not sure if the lemon would have helped.... larger beets may also make a difference. Lots more to experiment with this season :)
I have no experience with this, but with maple syrup you use a hydrometer. You need the steel tube and the hydrometer that floats in the syrup. It will tell you the sugar content to tell you if your done boiling enough water out. This may help with the drying process as well, it may have been too wet. Thanks for the info I want to start this journey myself.
This is great tip and we will have to pick one up. We still have to process our beets for this season and we grew a lot.more so we are very excited. Thank you so much for watching.
I think I would probably run the beets through my KitchenAid juicer attachment and that would really cut down the work. I guess the pulp could be squeezed in a jelly bag to get every last drop of juice. Maybe you could just borrow a juicer for a day or two when you make sugar. Filter the juice through a jelly bag.
Exactly. No extra processing or refining and the nice thing is that we were able to grow it in our growing zone. We have learned a lot from many peoples comments and hopefully we can improve this years results!
You need to keep the water level up, more is better. When you let the water boil away while steeping the beets, you let the sugar re-enter the beet flesh. No amount of pressing will get the sugars back out. Boiling the beets a second time would increase yield but is a lot of water. If you have wood burn stove you heat with, the extra boil is not as bad. You can just put the pan on top to let the water evaporate for a day, do not let it boil if the surface can get very hot, just on the edge. Things will get messy lol. Then move to a stove with a thermometer to boil the sugar up to temp (temp determines water content for crystallization).
That's amazing to see, I was just watching Townsends where they were using a sugar in a recipe and I got thinking... "but i wonder how people made sugar substitutes ". Maybe Sugar Beets were used. Great video thanks :)
Glad you enjoyed it! this was quite the learning experience for us as well because its not something that's super easy to find information on compared to most other types of vegetables from growing to harvest. But its certainly worth it or at least we feel it is. The sugar beets take a little bit of time to grow (longer than most "eating" beets) but its worth the wait!
@@HickorycroftFarm I since went down a weird sugar beet rabbit hole and found out all the sugar made in my country is from sugar beets, and they make topsoil with the scraps and heat greenhouses with the steam from the process :D... Im turning into a real life Dwight Schrute.
@@KrisHammes That is interesting its pretty neat to go down that rabbit hole and find where things come from etc. That is the nice part with the sugar beets is you get the "beet pulp" that can be used as a feed for animals or compost etc. Its quite versatile!
I don't know if you have tried making beet sugar again (I couldn't find an update video if you did) but I think I can provide some tips gleaned from beer brewing. 1) Tempeture control is your friend, I would invest in a candy thermometer if you don't already have one. 2) After you press the boiled beet hash you should sparge it with hot water to pull more sugars from the mash. You do this by simply pouring, slowly, hot water over the whole surface of the drained beet hash and let it drain through it into the container below (this will extract more sugars than simply pressing does) and then press a second time. (This will increase your sugar content, but also the beet water volume so the boil off to reach the finished syrup stage will take long.) 3) A hydrometer or a refractometer (this would be the prefered of the two) will allow you to measure the liquid density and help calculate the sugars in your syrup (this is used by both maple syrup people and beer brewers for the same reason). 4) Finally, you can use a coffee grinder or grain grinder to crush the large sugar crystals to a uniform size, just wash it well afterwards, especially if you use the same one for coffee/grains. Or, toss some in a hand held salt grinder if you only need small quantities at a time and don't have one of the other grinders. All that being said, nearly a cup of finished sugar from 3 pounds of beets is pretty good.
You took it off the heat too soon. If you keep it on the heat source and fight your instict telling you to take it off, keep stiring briskly and the entire batch will start to get grainy, then crumbly and then BAM! It will be granulated like grains of sand on a tropical beach. I promise you! You almost had it. You don't need to crush, grind, smash or any of those things. It's so much more simple than all that. Find some yt videos on how to make maple sugar. It will show you the entire process. You will laugh at how oh so close you are to the finished sugary product. 😁💪 Awesome work!!!
i put in the silicon ice bits. to strop in my tea. you have to simmer longer it was to loose still thats all. use the indian spice processor works best.
that is a good idea! we have been looking into some different options for processing this as well as grinding other things so we will look into the Indian spice processor!
I watched an interesting video from the channel Wilderstead a few days ago. One couple were making sugar from pre-made homemade maple syrup. They boiled the syrup to about 260f, took it off heat, and used a handheld electric mixer and it magically turned into powder after about three minutes on high. Crazy to watch, but very satisfying. I wonder if the same technique would work for you?
We watched that video as well. We are looking forward to trying some different methods this year with our beets as we have had so much great advice in the comments here.
It wouldn't they look like they already did dehydrated in the bucket. I don't know where you live I have experience grow beets make sugar. Store outside, dont dig if ground temp and root temp is above 55F
We just covered it on the counter, in the fall our house is not terribly hot and it seemed to work pretty well for the most part at least. I'm not sure if refrigeration would slow the process down or not to be honest so that's something we will have to look into.
We did try that this year. We used it as flour. We subbed in a half cup for half cup of regular flour. It worked well we think. Shall do that again this year and talk more about it.
We are glad you enjoyed the video! We are actually in the process of letting several sugar beets go to seed and we will do an update on that when they get closer to harvest. I believe in our root vegetable playlist we do have a video from this spring where we talk about storing the beets for seed saving and re-planting them etc. but they take a fairly long time to go to seed and set seed so the process is not quite done yet. But stay tuned!
Sugar beets are part of the beet family, related to the red ones that you buy in the store. The difference is that they have a very high sugar content, so once you let them grow large enough ( by this point they are not able to be eaten fresh really as they become quite woody) you can extract the sugar from them in the form of syrup. They are very very tasty if you roast them up when they are small and young.
We are in Eastern Ontario, zone 5b in Canada and the beets do great. They take a little over 3 months and we find the longer we leave them in the bigger they get. They are biannual, so you have to save some of the roots to plant again the following year for seed, but we have done that twice now and had a pretty decent seed harvest from them. Enough for a few years of planting and then some. We find it very worthwhile. Hope that answers your question well enough.
I would think it would be better the refined white sugar. I imagine it is similar to using raw sugar. We will have to look into this for some more details... now I am curious.
Do you think the sirrup will crystallize too without adding sugar crystals at the start? Just thinking towards “needing 0% ingredients from the store” ? 😊
There may be ways to get that to work, but we have read some conflicting info on it (and have not had the opportunity to experiment too much lately). We actually have been finding that only boiling it down to the syrup is, for us, at least, a better way to use the sugar beets and use it more like maple syrup.
We made sugar beet cake with it and it was so good. I believe we did it as a video and we also fried it up like potato pancakes and they were so good. I am sure it would work in other things to
I have no idea. I'm sure someone somewhere in the world has tried it. The sugar water is really good tasting and even though it is sugar its not as sickly sweet as a lot of modern sugars we are used to. Could be an interesting experiment.
We purchased a good coffee grinder to do the job this year. It has actually come in quite handy for a lot of things around the homestead kitchen. Thank you for the tip 😀
I am not sure. We might try it with some of our beets this year. In 2022 we did not make sugar, we just made syrup with them, but this year we are hoping for a good harvest to try some of our viewers suggestions.
We have not tried it that way, but I would be curious. The shredded pulp of the beet was so delicious after we cooked and pressed it. I was tempted to try and make it into something similar to potato pancakes. Might try this year. Thank you so much for watching.
I have been wondering about making my own sugar from sugar beets for a long time, and wonder if they can be created into much the same bricks as panela or the "black" sugar of Asia?
And you say you could eat it by itself, there's actually a product in Germany called "Zuckerrübensirup" which is a slightly thicker version of what you had in the video. Deeply rich sugar beet syrup, mostly for spreading on bread and that sort of thing. Thank you for this wonderfully experimental video, showing all the steps of the process! Best of luck to you in your future ventures
We did a quick Google of panela. I am not sure if it would go the same. I wonder if they pour it into molds to harden? Very curious on this. We kept it very thin to harden so that we could break it up easier. We are definitely still experimenting with it and perhaps shall try this this year.
We are very keen to try making the syrup this year. Another viewer mentioned it when we first put this video out and we were hooked on the idea. She mentioned that they put it on potato pancakes, which we love here on the homestead.
That is the wonderful thing about this. The "pulp" that is left over is great for sheep or goats or horses. The chickens have trouble with breaking it down. But basically it is similar to the beet pulp you can commercially buy for livestock.
OK, I have NO experience with Sugar beets but, some experience with making candy, and even more experience with Maple syrup. After pressing, I would have added a bit of boiling water, strained through a coffee filter, and rinsed that with boiling water too. I think the variation in the recipes you've read are people using the Rock Candy method, which uses sugar to seed the crystallization process, and others using the Maple Sugar process, which does not. Personally I would use the Maple Sugar process. Boil Syrup to 160F (use a candy thermometer!) Then, using an old school double paddle hand blender on high, mix in the pan (off the heat) until it turns to sugar, may take a 1/2 an hour, depending on humidity... super easy... I can guarantee it works for Maple Syrup > Sugar.
Thank you so much! Awesome advice. We are very new to this and are going to grow them and try again next year for sure. We will try this method!
Just a quick tip, apparently sugar beets lose sugar after they are harvested, (they're still alive in the beginning & using their stored energy) so the sooner you process them the more sugar you'll get
Oh that is an awesome tip. Thank you so much. We are always terribly behind to do everything, but we are getting there. We should do it as an experiment as we haven't processed the harvest from 2021. We should do 2022 harvest right away and see if it makes a difference.
@@HickorycroftFarm Thats a great idea! I just got on a late night research rabbit hole on how to make sugar from sugar beets & learned that on a 'how its made' video about how the commercial companies do it 😂
We are going to try doing 10 or 15 lbs now and next harvest try the same weight right away and see if there is a difference. Kind of excited to try it. Thanks for the idea lol.
Same concept like freshly harvested corn...far more sweeter that dried corn.
This is so interesting and helpful. Thank you. 🍭 xx
Experimental cooking is cool.
This was a lovely video I really enjoyed it! We are going to try this.
Thank you! We are glad you enjoyed it
This is something I've wondered about for a very long time! So cool!
It was a great experiment. We were happy with the results and to be honest it was very little effort, just waiting lol
Great video!
One suggestion for grinding your sugar crystals is to use a pepper mill or a grain mill. It will work much better!
Keep up the great work! Have a better day!
That's a good idea (we never thought of that one). Easy enough to do and it would do a good job of it to. We will have to try that with this years sugar!
I got here while researching food preservation. I think the syrup would work for making jelly or jam. With my luck I'll probably find the perfect method for ruining sugar beets AND plums 😁
We haven't experimented with it but its likely it would with a bit of tweaking. The only thing we would wonder is about how it would set (i.e. would you need more pectin etc.). It's something to play around with for sure though! We are looking forward to this winter and processing our sugar beets from the 2021 growing season. All and all it was not that hard to do. Not sure if you came across it but we also did a video this year on making syrup from Mennonite sorghum and it also turned out pretty good (another plant more people should probably think about growing). We are certainly glad you found us though food preservation is an important part of growing food that is for sure!
This is pretty neat! Can't wait for future experiments!!
It worked Great! This year we grew a lot and are going to make syrup which we are quite excited for.
A different video I watched on making sugar used an electric hand blender while the syrup was still hot, to cool and break it up into granules. It was for condensed maple syrup and not sugar beets, but it could be worth a shot.
Suggestion #1-stir the crystals as they dry. Suggestion #2-for grinding, try using a coffee grinder or spice grinder
Looks delicious, very interesting process. Looking forward to next year!
It worked quite well and was relatively easy to do. Definitely areas to improve and we are hoping for good results with this years harvest 😃. Thanks for watching
That was cool! Thanks for sharing!
You are most welcome. We enjoyed this experiment 😀
This was so interesting! Thanks for sharing this 😀
It has been a very interesting project. We are so pleased with the results.
Way to go! Super cool to make your own sugar.
It is,and we are so glad it worked. Looking forward to trying again this year.
Thank you! I planted sugar beets this year and can't wait to harvest them
Our small crop for this year is looking good. We are excited to get it out and try a few different things with it.
Your video is very encouraging...thank you! I have my seeds all ready to plant!
Awesome. We really feel sugar beets are worth having, even if it is only as a supplementary sugar source. Hope they grow well for you! 😃
Thank you
Wow that’s incredible!!! 😊 Thanks so very much for sharing❣️💋💖🦋
It's pretty neat to make a sweetener out of sugar beets at home. Certainly, if you don't have maple trees for maple syrup, it is a great way to make some sugar or syrups at home!
awesome experiment guys..love it
It was fun, and potentially something that could end up very useful one day. We are planting a big patch of sugar beets this season so hopefully great results on the next try.
That is a really nice outcome!
We were pleasantly surprised to be honest. I did not think that we would get that much.
cool!
so cool
Thanks so much 😃
awesome job thank you for taking us along! I'm gonna try this I have a few in the ground now I need to harvest!
We hope it works well for you. We definitely find the sugar beets worthwhile.
That was really interesting 🧐 thanks ...
Thanks so much for watching
Great job.
Thank you 😃
Very interesting. Thinking of you guys during this week of bad weather. Please stay safe, warm, and healthy. Thank you for sharing! Hugs and love to you and your family my friends. ❤️✝🤗 Have a beautiful and blessed week. ❤️✝🤗
Thank you so much! We have been quite fortunate and most of the bad stuff has really missed us. But our thoughts are definitely with all those that are struggling right now.
good👍
Pop the bigger crystals into a coffee grinder. Small batches in a small coffee grinder will give you a more even finished product.
A very cool experiment. I’ll be giving it a try once I move.
Great idea! We wondered about a grinder. The beets are growing very very well this year so we are excited to try again, and make the syrup as well. Thank you so much for watching and commenting.
@@HickorycroftFarm yes it will definitely work. In the food processor those bigger pieces are just flying around at the top and not coming into contact with the blades. In a coffee grinder that won’t happen because of the smaller bowl and slightly different shape. The blades are a different shape too. It’s designed to take small amounts of hard things and grind to a powder. A food processor is designed to chop larger amounts. You’ll have to do lots of little batches in the coffee grinder which might get annoying if you have lots this year. In that case I would try the food processor first. It might do a better job if it’s almost full. If you leave a full food processor running with powders in it (which it will turn the shards to at the bottom) you will actually start to see it turning the contents over. The bits on top fall into the vortex created by the blades and get incorporated. I make a huge batch of hot chocolate mix for my mum every year for Mother’s Day. She has one every night so I made her a gourmet version lol. That has cocoa and sugar and milk powder that start off in layers and as it runs I can see the top bits falling inside, but also can see the mixed bits rising. I let it turn everything over twice as I’m mixing more than grinding and I want a fine powder. It runs for a good 8 or so minutes straight to turn it all over so you need to be sure you have a food processor that can handle that. (Check out some of Noreen’s Kitchens hot chocolate videos. I didn’t use her recipe but I got the food processor method from her and in a couple of her vids you can see it turning over so you’ll know what I’m talking about and will get a sense of how long it needs to run). With sugar you should be able to see the shards falling in and the granulated sugar rising up. You would want to check it as you go to make sure it’s not becoming too fine a powder on the bottom. It could be like confectioners sugar rather than granulated sugar. The coffee grinder would give more control and if you did overdo it and get confectioners sugar it would only be that small grinderful, not the whole batch. Also with the food processor even if it works for the bulk of it you will get to a point where there are shards left but if you keep going to chop them you’ll overdo the rest of it so then you’ll want to sift out the chunky bits and do them in a coffee grinder. So, after all of that lol, if you do have enough to fill the food processor, I think it really comes down to do you trust it to do the job, and if it dies trying can you either live without it or afford to replace it immediately. If you can’t, maybe multiple little batches in a cheap coffee grinder is a much safer option.
Oh, another food processor trick you could try with the bigger bits is to have the empty food processor running and drop a couple of pieces at a time through the chute. It works with chocolate chips. Might work with sugar bits. It’s another thing I picked up from Noreen. It’s very noisy lol, but it does chop them up way better than putting them in the bowl first.
@@moniquem783 awesome! We will take a look at her videos. We love fresh ground coffee lol, but have always ground it at the store. We think it is time to just buy the grinder.
@@HickorycroftFarm once you have one you’ll find it comes in handy for lots of things. Spices etc are great in it. You could even do small amounts of wheat berries or dried corn to make cornmeal. If you can find one with a removable bowl/cup it makes washing up much easier than the regular ones as you can throw it in the sink or dishwasher with the rest of the dishes and clean it thoroughly. The regular ones you can only wipe it out with a soft cloth around the sharp blades which isn’t fun, particularly if you want to clean it thoroughly so you can put a different spice in it.
Thank you so much
Most welcome 😃. Thank you so much for watching
All in all, I would call it a success. It's like anything else related to growing your food---you never stop learning and figuring out better ways to grow and process the food.
Exactly! Thank you so much for this wonderful comment. We are always learning and developing as well as trying and experimenting.
Anytime you're trying something you haven't done before... it's trial and error! LOL. New sub here 😁
A coffee grinder will get you to the consistency of sugar, also when boiling it down if you get it to 130•F - 55.4 C while still hot take a hand mixer and mix to sugar it may take a while but it will turn to sugar as it cooks while mixing
The coffee grinder is something we have added to the kitchen (two actually!) and it was just something we didn't have at the time we put this video together. But it does make a big difference (and you can turn so many other things into powders etc. as well!)
So neat! I like your cheese cloth press! I’ve never seen anything like it. 😊
Angie made a shout out to this video last night. I am watching it again and adding it to my favourite list lol
It was a fun experiment and we still have to process our beets from this year.
Finaly got to come see this one.
Thanks for stopping in to watch Mal. It was a very fun experiment. It is also nice to know that in a crisis situation... if there ever was one that involved no sugar, we would be good lol.
View, “This is how we make our own sugar” video.... amazing!
Very interesting! You will definitely need to grow a lot of beets! That looks super tasty though!
In typical us fashion, we were late on every step. So hopefully this year we will improve in growth and timing.
As a kid the last load of beets of the season came to my uncles yard and we spent days peeling, chopping and cooking beets to beet syrup. I miss those days
What a wonderful memory! Thank you for watching and sharing. We really enjoyed the syrup and find it more useful in our cooking needs then the sugar. It has such a great flavor.
Watched this to figure out how to make sugar so I can make ethanol so I can make biodiesel. You will have helped me greatly in the process so thank you.
That is an interesting application and I'm sure it would work well! I do have some friends who have talked about making biodiesel but its not something we know a lot about.
So...I was singing the song Sugartown in my head and got this great idea to make my own sugar from beets. I will try this but I will try to speed this process up with my food dehydrator. Along with the cooked beet portion. I have a vitamix to chop it finer later. Excited! Thank you for your video!!! And thank you Nancy Sinatra for that fun song.
That is a fitting song for processing sugar beets! Hopefully the dehydrator helps speed up the process. We don't have a vita mix but if they chop finer than a normal food processor it might work really well.
I was thinking dehydrator also
I was curious about making my own sugar. That is a great video. I think I will try it my self. I will be using the maple syrup method. The silicone ice cube tray sounds like a good idea. I might try that too.
Sugar beets are certainly another great way to make sugar and we highly recommend growing them (its a positive redundancy if you have other sugar sources such as maple syrup!). We should try the maple syrup method of turning it into sugar (will try that with the 2021 crop we still have to process). The trays worked as a first attempt but you do have to "seed" it with sugar granules so the other method would likely be better.
Tesekur ederim bende seker nasil yaparim diye merak ediyodum devamı gelsin
Kesinlikle şeker yapmanın bir yolu ve biz onun tadını oldukça beğeniyoruz. Tohumları bulabilirseniz, kesinlikle büyümeye değer!
@@HickorycroftFarm tesekur ederim tohumlarım vardıda amatör olarak nasıl nasıl yapıcağını bilmiyordum tesekurler
New here, This was very interesting, I had never heard of this before. I enjoyed following along in the process. Stop by and visit.
So glad you enjoyed, and welcome 😃. Shall definitely stop by
I remember sugar rationing by government in my childhood, a good thing i know my mom would have appreciated back then.
Exactly! Even if we don't actually produce all our sugar needs, it is nice to have the skill and the seeds to do so if we choose. We only grew a small amount this year, but we are looking forward to fine tuning our methods. Thanks so much for watching.
I think I would put it in my dehydrater to speed up the drying process,and use my magic bullet to grid it😊
Since we did this video, we have progressed to using a coffee grinder for a lot of things (including this), and it does work well! The dehydrator may work to that's not something we have tried yet to be honest.
We have sugar maples on our place an we made syrup a while back. I figured we got 4-5 table spoon per gallon of sap. Yep, was not worth getting out of bed for. It was fun and we did get some quality free time so no big loss.
It was a great project to do so that we knew we could. It is great to have the ability to be able to make these products in a crisis situation. We are curious to try making the syrup this year, stopping there rather then taking it to the sugar stage. There is something satisfying about producing our own products, but realistically it is just to supplement what we purchase :)
Really nice video, thank you. And to explain the crystal thing. Crystals grow fasted from an existing lattice. You can see the difference. Take two pots of water, put them in your freezer, and once they are pretty cold, put an ice cube in one of them. It will 'freeze' much faster than the one without the ice cube.
That does make sense it's like you say freezing water will often freeze around an object and as the crystals form they all attach. Glad you enjoyed the video! the sugar beets are an interesting addition to the homestead!
This was a great video! I have a granite mortar and pestel. it is rough on the inside and i bet it would work;
There have been many suggestions. We are going to try a coffee grinder this year and see. The mortar and pestel might work too.
You can try a coffee grinder as they did in the maple sugar video....
Thanks for the video! Honestly, I’d just use it in the larger chunks. Most recipes would allow you to dissolve it in whatever liquid the recipe called for. Thanks again! I learned a lot!
Glad you enjoyed it! Since we did this video, we even find leaving it as a syrup works well for 99% of what we tend to use sugar in (not great for all kinds of baking, but...), which cuts down on the last few steps. We just wanted to see if we could do it and it was a fun experiment to try taking it to that granulated "sugar" like state.
When we used to make rock candy we laid it put on wax paper. That may work well for this.
We could certainly try this. We found the silicone trays that were flexible quite helpful.
I know that vitamin C can be used to help whiten foods. I've added it to my apples once to try.. worked great trying to make sauce and experimenting for pectin content. I enjoyed seeing the process as I was thinking of growing sweet sorghum for grain and sugar..
We have never tried adding vitamin C to anything before, we may have to look into that! This was a neat experiment and we are set to scale it up a bit this year (and actually need to look at getting the beets planted soon to make the most of it). We to are going to try sorghum as another experiment this year, we figure it can't hurt to diversify on the sugar production! We have some Mennonite sorghum seeds to try (we have grown sorghum before but never this variety) so looking forward to that project to!
@@HickorycroftFarm hi I'm from New Zealand and found this very interesting. It's just past mid summer here, so I will try growing some sugarbeet this year.
Forgetting about your beets is the sort of thing I would do, so I had a little chuckle about that, but the way they shrunk would have just consentrated the sugar content so no harm done.
I love to experiment, and have been thinking about the grated pulp that was left over, what did you do with it?
My first thought was feed it to the chickens, or maybe compost it, now I'm wondering if it would be a good idea to add more water, like lots of water and make some kind of liquid fertilzer for the garden, perhaps even something like a fermented JADAM style plant food.
Did you grow more sugarbeet this year? I guess if you did, it will be about another 3 months before you harvest wouldn't it?
Great job! We just really want to taste the sugar. It looks really delicious. I wonder what the percentage would have been had they been fresher? It will be really cool to see how you do with them next season!
Thanks so much! Not sure if it would have been better or not, they would have only lost moisture really (that 8s out guess) I think the percentage would have been higher if people hadn't kept "trying" it lol. Can't wait to see how it goes next time.
As soon as you said 3 lbs. 14 oz., I thought about the fact that I was born at 2 lbs. 14 oz. Now you just moved to throwing me into the food blender and I’m grossed out 4:07 😂. I started joking about my addiction to sugar when I’ve been able to quit everything else in life. I’m like what do I do if the world goes to heck? So I came over here to learn how to make sure in case it runs out through the regular sources. 😂. I’m eating a giant pack of sweet tarts I just had delivered. 😅. They now make them the size of a roll of Tums, like you would get in a bottle. If I were you, I would be running around the house right now but at almost 60, not so much. Food processor to modern. I’m getting a mortar and pestal : ) 16:36 sorry I was 20 seconds too early😂. All the really paint stuff gets used as cinnamon sugar. 😂
That lumpier stuff looks ideal for coffee. You could probably sell it as a product. I'd sparge the pulp with hot water, the way brewers extract sugar from grain.
We have learned so much from the comments on this video. We are really looking forward to our harvest this year and fine tuning our sugar making skills 😃
Great video! Thank you! Have been wondering about this process to for alternatives. Do you know what variety of sugar beet is best? Which did you use?
It is nice just to know that we have options. We would love to do Maple syrup one day too. And it was relatively simple and we did it with stuff that we had around the house... granted, we need a better way to grind it.
The beets were just a generic sugar beet that we were able to order online. This year we are hoping to save our own seed from our own saved beets... fingers crossed. I know MIgardener sells them, we originally got our ones in Canada from Salt Spring Seeds, but they no longer carry them.
Always good to know multiple self-sufficiency skills; however, I'm thinking this is really labor intensive and time-consuming compared to my stevia (easy to grow, easy to dry/powder, and useable right off the plant). Great experiment, though! 🌵
Oh yes, we grow stevia as well and love it. Always dry lots for winter use as it is hard for us to grow it year round, but we have been successful cloning it to have new plants for the next garden season. One of the main reasons we are choosing to still do the sugar beets is for canning purposes, for jams, jellies and things like that. It is nice to have multiple sources for things to help build our resilience and sustainability. Thank you so much for watching.
We use our grain mill for final grinding. Ours has stainless and ceramic burrs and we use the stainless burrs for sugar.
That is a great idea. We didn't have one last year but now have an old cast food mill we could likely use as well. Its certainly all a good learning curve. We do want to get a proper grain mill though in the future so could see that working quite well to!
Hickorycroft Farm I understand. We saved for almost two years to get ours but now we use it for everything. Corn, coffee, sugar, nut butter. We even used it to crack some mustard seed for creole mustard. Get the best quality you can afford and it will pay for itself.
You can try "grinding using a tumbler with _glass_ balls/marbles. I suppose it's worth a shot.
A good coffee grinder really did the trick. Still summer powder parts, but mostly decent chunks.
Pretty cool 😎 how long do you think the syrup would last?
Hey you guys we saw a video from a couple in Canada who bottled their own maple syrup and we watched him cook a jar if his syrup down and whip it with a hand mixer and it turned to sugar in the hot pan! They had a big rubber bin of sugar they made. I will send you the link to that video. We are working with sygar cane juice we press from canes ourselves but the process whether its beet juice, cane juice or maple syrup is the same.
From what I have read, the crystals are grown while the batch is still wet. This is then put in a centrifuge where the dark liquid is removed from the white crystals.
I just watched a video with sugar from mapple syrup and ,they mixed the boiling syrup with hand mixer to obtain crystals sugar.
This is so cool. My brother used to buy sugar beets by the ton in the fall to feed the deer. He would leave them outside to freeze because he said it made them sweeter. His were big I don’t know if it because where they grew, in the north. I’ll have to try this next fall when they become available again. I wonder if a bit of lemon juice in the water would prevent the darkening. Great fun! Thanks for sharing.
☮️-Kirsten
Thanks Kirsten. I (Steph) used to live out west and piles of beets was not an uncommon sight, but I never thought about it. Ours should have grow a lot larger, but we were very late planting them, so then they battled with dry conditions and.... well tons of excuses lol. Bottom line is that this year we are planning to do much better with them now that we know it can result in the sugar. I am not sure if the lemon would have helped.... larger beets may also make a difference. Lots more to experiment with this season :)
@@HickorycroftFarm I can’t wait to see how that turns out Steph!
I have no experience with this, but with maple syrup you use a hydrometer. You need the steel tube and the hydrometer that floats in the syrup. It will tell you the sugar content to tell you if your done boiling enough water out. This may help with the drying process as well, it may have been too wet. Thanks for the info I want to start this journey myself.
This is great tip and we will have to pick one up. We still have to process our beets for this season and we grew a lot.more so we are very excited. Thank you so much for watching.
I think I would probably run the beets through my KitchenAid juicer attachment and that would really cut down the work. I guess the pulp could be squeezed in a jelly bag to get every last drop of juice. Maybe you could just borrow a juicer for a day or two when you make sugar. Filter the juice through a jelly bag.
Cud try it as cubes and try them in a silicone cubed tray
Another great idea! We have seen those ice cube trays in the store and we would be able to pop them right out.
And is healthy
Exactly. No extra processing or refining and the nice thing is that we were able to grow it in our growing zone. We have learned a lot from many peoples comments and hopefully we can improve this years results!
You need to keep the water level up, more is better. When you let the water boil away while steeping the beets, you let the sugar re-enter the beet flesh. No amount of pressing will get the sugars back out. Boiling the beets a second time would increase yield but is a lot of water. If you have wood burn stove you heat with, the extra boil is not as bad. You can just put the pan on top to let the water evaporate for a day, do not let it boil if the surface can get very hot, just on the edge. Things will get messy lol. Then move to a stove with a thermometer to boil the sugar up to temp (temp determines water content for crystallization).
That's amazing to see, I was just watching Townsends where they were using a sugar in a recipe and I got thinking... "but i wonder how people made sugar substitutes ". Maybe Sugar Beets were used. Great video thanks :)
Glad you enjoyed it! this was quite the learning experience for us as well because its not something that's super easy to find information on compared to most other types of vegetables from growing to harvest. But its certainly worth it or at least we feel it is. The sugar beets take a little bit of time to grow (longer than most "eating" beets) but its worth the wait!
@@HickorycroftFarm I since went down a weird sugar beet rabbit hole and found out all the sugar made in my country is from sugar beets, and they make topsoil with the scraps and heat greenhouses with the steam from the process :D... Im turning into a real life Dwight Schrute.
@@KrisHammes That is interesting its pretty neat to go down that rabbit hole and find where things come from etc. That is the nice part with the sugar beets is you get the "beet pulp" that can be used as a feed for animals or compost etc. Its quite versatile!
I don't know if you have tried making beet sugar again (I couldn't find an update video if you did) but I think I can provide some tips gleaned from beer brewing.
1) Tempeture control is your friend, I would invest in a candy thermometer if you don't already have one.
2) After you press the boiled beet hash you should sparge it with hot water to pull more sugars from the mash.
You do this by simply pouring, slowly, hot water over the whole surface of the drained beet hash and let it drain through it into the container below (this will extract more sugars than simply pressing does) and then press a second time.
(This will increase your sugar content, but also the beet water volume so the boil off to reach the finished syrup stage will take long.)
3) A hydrometer or a refractometer (this would be the prefered of the two) will allow you to measure the liquid density and help calculate the sugars in your syrup (this is used by both maple syrup people and beer brewers for the same reason).
4) Finally, you can use a coffee grinder or grain grinder to crush the large sugar crystals to a uniform size, just wash it well afterwards, especially if you use the same one for coffee/grains.
Or, toss some in a hand held salt grinder if you only need small quantities at a time and don't have one of the other grinders.
All that being said, nearly a cup of finished sugar from 3 pounds of beets is pretty good.
You took it off the heat too soon. If you keep it on the heat source and fight your instict telling you to take it off, keep stiring briskly and the entire batch will start to get grainy, then crumbly and then BAM! It will be granulated like grains of sand on a tropical beach. I promise you! You almost had it. You don't need to crush, grind, smash or any of those things. It's so much more simple than all that. Find some yt videos on how to make maple sugar. It will show you the entire process. You will laugh at how oh so close you are to the finished sugary product. 😁💪 Awesome work!!!
i put in the silicon ice bits. to strop in my tea. you have to simmer longer it was to loose still thats all. use the indian spice processor works best.
that is a good idea! we have been looking into some different options for processing this as well as grinding other things so we will look into the Indian spice processor!
from "India" they have the best processors for spice. majority of them cook from scratch and make own. :)
Coffee grinder is what the last video that did maple sugar.
We switched to a coffee grinder and it works so much better.
Looks like Hey Ron
I watched an interesting video from the channel Wilderstead a few days ago. One couple were making sugar from pre-made homemade maple syrup. They boiled the syrup to about 260f, took it off heat, and used a handheld electric mixer and it magically turned into powder after about three minutes on high. Crazy to watch, but very satisfying. I wonder if the same technique would work for you?
We watched that video as well. We are looking forward to trying some different methods this year with our beets as we have had so much great advice in the comments here.
You might use a rock tumbler with a metal ball or two and just let it go for a few hours to grind the crystals to a powder.
Ohhh that is an interesting idea. We are going to try a coffee grinder too as many people have made that suggestion.
this is cool C'mon!!
Thanks. We had fun with it.
i wonder if a dehydrator would speed up the process. cool video
We are certainly going to keep playing around with it. My new oven has a dehydrate button, so that may change our world now lol.
It wouldn't they look like they already did dehydrated in the bucket. I don't know where you live I have experience grow beets make sugar. Store outside, dont dig if ground temp and root temp is above 55F
Nice one! Have you tried (shag)bark hickory syrup?
No! But the people that we bought the farm from used to make it and said we should. There are tons of shagbark trees here.
While you arewaiting for it to crystalize do you refrigerate? or just cover on the counter?
We just covered it on the counter, in the fall our house is not terribly hot and it seemed to work pretty well for the most part at least. I'm not sure if refrigeration would slow the process down or not to be honest so that's something we will have to look into.
I would think Sugar water would be fine for most needs.
Back in the day sugar used to come in a lump, or rock you had to chip and shave off.
Could the left-over pulp be dehydrated and ground? Might be good in bbq sauce, cookies, etc.
We did try that this year. We used it as flour. We subbed in a half cup for half cup of regular flour. It worked well we think. Shall do that again this year and talk more about it.
to get smaller granules at the end, put the bigger granules through a coffee grinder to get the right size.
We bought a great grinder and are excited to use it this year on the sugar.
I enjoyed your video . But I have question . When the sugar plants do seeds and how can I deal with them.
We are glad you enjoyed the video! We are actually in the process of letting several sugar beets go to seed and we will do an update on that when they get closer to harvest. I believe in our root vegetable playlist we do have a video from this spring where we talk about storing the beets for seed saving and re-planting them etc. but they take a fairly long time to go to seed and set seed so the process is not quite done yet. But stay tuned!
Thanks for sharing 4-17-22., What are sugar beets I know you plant them I am going to look it up, but thanks
Sugar beets are part of the beet family, related to the red ones that you buy in the store. The difference is that they have a very high sugar content, so once you let them grow large enough ( by this point they are not able to be eaten fresh really as they become quite woody) you can extract the sugar from them in the form of syrup. They are very very tasty if you roast them up when they are small and young.
I live north east , I'm wondering how long does the sugar beet take to grow, & will the plant produce seeds? Thank you.
We are in Eastern Ontario, zone 5b in Canada and the beets do great. They take a little over 3 months and we find the longer we leave them in the bigger they get. They are biannual, so you have to save some of the roots to plant again the following year for seed, but we have done that twice now and had a pretty decent seed harvest from them. Enough for a few years of planting and then some. We find it very worthwhile. Hope that answers your question well enough.
I love this!!!! Is the sugar healthier than regular sugar? I am definitely going to get some seeds! Thanks guys! Jess
Salt spring seeds sells sugar beet seed
I would think it would be better the refined white sugar. I imagine it is similar to using raw sugar. We will have to look into this for some more details... now I am curious.
@@HickorycroftFarm it would be interesting to know- is it the glycemic index? Like how rice malt syrup is better than sugar etc 🤔 ...
Do you think the sirrup will crystallize too without adding sugar crystals at the start? Just thinking towards “needing 0% ingredients from the store” ? 😊
There may be ways to get that to work, but we have read some conflicting info on it (and have not had the opportunity to experiment too much lately). We actually have been finding that only boiling it down to the syrup is, for us, at least, a better way to use the sugar beets and use it more like maple syrup.
It seems like you could throw the pulp into muffins or pancake batter to use up, (if you did not have animals to spoil)
We made sugar beet cake with it and it was so good. I believe we did it as a video and we also fried it up like potato pancakes and they were so good. I am sure it would work in other things to
I wonder if you hopped the sugar water and fermented it what that would taste like?
I have no idea. I'm sure someone somewhere in the world has tried it. The sugar water is really good tasting and even though it is sugar its not as sickly sweet as a lot of modern sugars we are used to. Could be an interesting experiment.
Cant you use a mixer like making maple sugar?
We are hoping that our sugar beets do well this year in the garden so we can try some of the methods people have suggested. Thank you for the idea
That’s how the beet sugar looked at Teavana.
Excellent. We definitely enjoyed this experiment and are working towards making more.
Coffee grinder works best, slower doesn't beat the sugar into powder. Slow is your friend
We purchased a good coffee grinder to do the job this year. It has actually come in quite handy for a lot of things around the homestead kitchen. Thank you for the tip 😀
I wonder if it can be dried in the dehydrator?
I am not sure. We might try it with some of our beets this year. In 2022 we did not make sugar, we just made syrup with them, but this year we are hoping for a good harvest to try some of our viewers suggestions.
Could it be like use dehydrator until the fruit turns crispy and then pass through pulverizer since you said the fruit itself is so sweet. Hhhmmm
We have not tried it that way, but I would be curious. The shredded pulp of the beet was so delicious after we cooked and pressed it. I was tempted to try and make it into something similar to potato pancakes. Might try this year. Thank you so much for watching.
I have been wondering about making my own sugar from sugar beets for a long time, and wonder if they can be created into much the same bricks as panela or the "black" sugar of Asia?
And you say you could eat it by itself, there's actually a product in Germany called "Zuckerrübensirup" which is a slightly thicker version of what you had in the video. Deeply rich sugar beet syrup, mostly for spreading on bread and that sort of thing. Thank you for this wonderfully experimental video, showing all the steps of the process! Best of luck to you in your future ventures
We did a quick Google of panela. I am not sure if it would go the same. I wonder if they pour it into molds to harden? Very curious on this. We kept it very thin to harden so that we could break it up easier. We are definitely still experimenting with it and perhaps shall try this this year.
We are very keen to try making the syrup this year. Another viewer mentioned it when we first put this video out and we were hooked on the idea. She mentioned that they put it on potato pancakes, which we love here on the homestead.
Could you use the spent beet pulp as animal feed?
That is the wonderful thing about this. The "pulp" that is left over is great for sheep or goats or horses. The chickens have trouble with breaking it down. But basically it is similar to the beet pulp you can commercially buy for livestock.
Close to 1/2 # not bad
For first try we were pleased. We used it for coffee and it lasted quite a while. Hoping for quite a bit more this year
Did you film another video of making sugar this year? I couldn’t find anything in your video list.
We haven't pulled them out 9f the garden yet, but will be shortly with a video of the process and what we have learned and changed
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