Chapter 94: Sweet career
Autumn is the harvest season, and the autumn harvest in Southeast Province is particularly sweet!
On the Tainan Plain, it is like being in the ocean of sugarcane fields. The green sugar cane gardens are connected one by one, and the dense cane leaves dance with the wind.
During the harvest season, the sugar cane fields are busy. The sugarcane farmers were busy harvesting with sickles, and bundles of sugarcane chopped off were piled up in the fields.
Yan Changwu personally cut the first sickle, washed the cut sugarcane, and took a bite. It was so sweet!
Chen Zhongji, who had prepared for a long time, opened a sugar factory to make sugar from sugar cane!
At this time, on the Tainan Plain, the towering chimneys began to emit thick black smoke, the sugar press was spinning day and night, and the air was filled with the sweet smell of cane sugar.
The process of using sugarcane as raw material to produce white granulated sugar, raw sugar and other products through juice extraction, cleaning, evaporation, crystallization, honey separation and drying, and three sugars made in Southeast Province!
Which three sugars?
Brown sugar, white sugar and rock candy!
Chinese people have a long history of sugar making. In 1130, Wang Zhuo of the Northern Song Dynasty wrote China's first sugar making monograph-"Ice Cream". The book is divided into 7 chapters with rich content, which respectively describe the history of the development of sugar production in China, the cultivation methods of sugar cane, the equipment for sugar production (including pressing and smelting equipment), the process, the taste of icing, the use, the economy of the sugar industry, etc. .
the selection and production of the soil sugar
1. Material selection: Choose ripe sugarcane in the ripening season of sugarcane, and remove sugarcane leaves, tails and impurities after material selection.
2. Juicing: Use two big rocks to grind as a soil sugarcane press. There are 18 grooves on the top of the big stone mill, which are inserted into wooden wedges, which are equivalent to gears. There are wooden stakes fixed on them, which are equivalent to the shaft and the top of the shaft. Connecting a large beam (commonly known as "boom mast"), relying on animal power (usually with a cow) to pull the "boom mast", drive the two big rocks to roll each other, sugarcane is crushed into juice, the sugarcane juice runs along the bottom of the big rock The stone trough flows into the juice storage tank after filtering.
3. Filtration: The sugar worker uses a wooden scoop to scoop the cane juice in the juice storage tank into a wooden barrel, and then pour it into a large water tank equipped with a slender filter screen for filtration. Finally, the filtered cane juice is introduced into the sugar pot through a bamboo tube.
4. Boil: Heat and boil the filtered sugarcane juice to 280℃-300℃, stir constantly to remove bubbles and impurities, and let the water evaporate continuously. The heating material generally uses wood or bagasse.
5. Coagulation: Use a small amount of sugarcane juice and sea lime (for coagulation and neutralization) to mix and stir well. After the sugarcane juice in the sugar pot is boiled for 2-4 hours, pour the precipitated sea lime water into the sugar pot , Keep stirring, the syrup gradually formed.
Six. Sugar: From the initial sugar cane juice → sugar water → syrup (the whole process is 6-10 hours). Pay attention to time, heat, color, viscosity, etc. during the whole process.
Seven. Sugar: After the syrup is sugared (slightly earlier than the sugar stick), put the syrup into an iron pan, stir continuously with a pre-prepared wooden stick, and require a balanced strength and a moderate speed. After about 20 minutes, boil until the juice turns into a golden syrup. The bubble-turned syrup was poured onto a platform covered with bamboo mats. As the syrup cooled, people used tools to spread the syrup evenly. After a while, the syrup became brown sugar with yellow and white color.
The sugar masters specially invited from all over Fujian are operated by them. In the production process, the heat is very important. For example, when the sugar is heated, the sugar is light in the early stage, the sugar is difficult to solidify, and the heat is heavy in the late stage, and the sugar has a bitter taste. Only when the fire is in place can the appearance of the sugar be beautiful and the taste is sweet.
Besides the heat, you need to be patient. On the fire pit, the cane sugar water has to boil continuously for four or five hours. After most of the water evaporates, the cane sugar has the strongest aroma. The masters said: "During the process of boiling, you must constantly clean up impurities and constantly stir. Therefore, the most important thing in sugar making is to use your heart. Even the sugar cane water must be filtered many times before it can be put into the pot. cook."
The original brown sugar is freshly made, and there is absolutely no coloring and flavor added at the time. The mouth is sweet, aftertaste, and the taste is endless.
This mass of brown sugar is the crystallization of the hard work of the people, and it is a good season for the fragrance of brown sugar. The brown sugar made by the ancient method retains more of the nutrients of sugarcane and can quickly replenish physical strength. It contains carbohydrates that can provide heat, riboflavin, carotene, niacin, and trace elements manganese and zinc that are indispensable for human growth and development. , Chromium and other elements.
Rich in nutrition and delicious, Yan Changwu is delighted after tasting it!
……
Chinese people like to eat brown sugar, but if you want to sell it to Hong Maofan, you need white sugar.
White sand sugar is decolorized from red sand sugar. How to decolorize becomes the key to the technology.
In the mid-Jiajing period of the Ming Dynasty, there was a sugar maker named Huang in Nan'an, whose house collapsed due to the continuous spring rain. Back then, the houses were mostly rammed with mud, and the collapsed yellow mud walls pressed the red sand sugar in his house. Unexpectedly, after the long rainy season was over, the family removed the soil and found that all the brown sugar at home had turned white!
The accident turned into a comedy in an instant, and the secret of Baishatang was revealed. Therefore, according to the "yellow mud decolorization method" of Nan'an, Fujian's white sand sugar can finally be quantified production.
However, the white sand sugar at that time was only a little lighter in color and brighter at best, and there was no way to make it pure white.
At this time, the traverser’s power was shown. The yellow mud decolorization method was not used in the production. The workers took out a packet of black charcoal and put it into the red syrup. The colorless and clear solution is a clear juice, and crystallization is required at this time.
The clear juice is concentrated by evaporation to become a crude syrup. It must be further concentrated to precipitate crystals. Boiled crystals. The mixture with molasses is called massecuite. After the massecuite is unloaded, it is cooled down again to make the precipitation of sucrose more complete, and to make the original and crystals continue to grow. This process is to help crystallize. After the crystallization of the massecuite, the sucrose is separated from the molasses by a high-speed rotary centrifuge, and the separated white sugar is dried and sieved to obtain a product of a certain specification, which becomes the finished white sugar.
The sugar masters invited from Fujian were shocked!
Chen Zhongji smiled and said without a smile: "Do you understand why we give you such a high price and you still need to move your family to the southeast house?"
"If our sugar-making process is spread out, find out who said it, it is for rebellion, decapitation, and family slavery!" Chen Zhongji said sternly.
All the masters are Wei Wei, it is a pity that this method cannot make them rich.
The charcoal is not ordinary charcoal, it is activated charcoal!
If you have a microscope to observe activated carbon, it looks like a black "honeycomb", full of holes, and the surface area is very large. A substance with a large surface area has a characteristic that it will adsorb other things.
The surface area of activated carbon is very large, and the ability to "grab" molecules is particularly strong. In the brown sugar water, because the pigments are always large and heavy, when "passing" on the surface of the activated carbon, it looks like an elephant sinks through the quagmire and is most likely to be "grabbed" by the bone charcoal. Since the activated carbon adsorbs the pigment, once the activated carbon is filtered and the activated carbon is removed, the filtrate will be colorless, and the brown sugar will become white sugar.
Due to the larger solid particles of activated carbon, it is naturally filtered better than yellow mud, and the resulting white sugar looks very good!
The southeast prefecture uses widely planted coconut shells to make activated carbon. The method comes from Yan Changwu. When he was a geographic editor, he once did a program on ancient sugar production (in various places), including China, Cuba, Jamaica, and clear production. The whole process of sugar!
The centrifuge is driven by water power, and the activated carbon soil method is physically activated. It does not require chemical activation and can be produced in the environment at the time.
Make persistent efforts to produce rock candy:
White sugar is beautiful white crystals, but it also contains some water and the crystals are relatively small. Bingtang is "a new level". If you remove the water in the sugar, you can get large colorless crystals-rock sugar. Our country has made rock candy very early,
There are many ways to make rock candy, such as:
Traditional local cooking process:
First dissolve the sugar (the ratio of white sugar to water is 10:2.5), boil it, purify it with egg white water (about 5kg of water for 1 egg), and then filter it from the pot;
Re-boil the sugar: After the syrup is purified and filtered, it is returned to the pot and boiled to about 105 degrees~www.wuxiaspot.com~Drip the syrup into a bowl of cold water, and when it can be turned into a soft mass, it can be out of the pot;
Then make ice: use a small metal bucket or metal box bowl as a container. Place 2 bamboos (wood strips) across the mouth of the container, and tie four hemp ropes symmetrically on the bamboo and wooden slats, perpendicular to the container. In order to make the hemp rope vertical, the lower end of the hemp thread can be tied to the pendant. After the container is ready, pour the syrup into the container. Pile chaff husks around the container, cover the top with paper or cloth, and cover it with chaff husks, more in winter and less in summer to meet the needs of raw ice temperature;
The last is the ice out: the syrup is kept in the container for 7 days (it cannot be shaken, that is, crystallized into rock sugar. When the ice is out, first remove the cover and chaff from the container, scoop off the bottom ice near the crystal, and buckle the container upside down. On the tank with the wooden frame, after dripping the remaining water, tap the surrounding and bottom of the container with a wooden stick, and the rock candy can come out.
There is also a hanging thread process. The pure sugar is dissolved into a saturated thick sugar liquid, and then poured into a bucket or bucket-shaped container, and the cotton thread is hung in the bucket (arrange different cotton according to the size of the bucket. After about 1 week, it will be online. A lot of rock sugar (commonly known as column ice) will grow (crystallize), and at the same time, some crystal rock sugar will be formed on the edge of the bucket. After sugar washing and drying, the finished product is obtained.
Rock sugar comes from white sugar. The white sugar from Dongnan Province is good, and the quality of rock sugar is also rising, which is quite good.
……
In the warehouse, Yan Changwu and Chen Zhongji inspected and saw buckets of white sugar piled on the top of the warehouse. They walked all the way and walked back to the door of the warehouse. Chen Zhongji asked with a little worry: "Can those red hairpins eat so much cane sugar for us?" "
As soon as the voice of fell, a half-baked Chinese saying came from outside: "CEO Chen, for the sugar, we will charge as much as we can get the red hair fan!"
