Cooking your sugar

The next step in sugar processing was the cooking of sugar. It has come from the cutting knives and then the cut sugar was sent of to areas within the plant where it was cooked, filtered and then brewed. This part of the process was really automatic, so I never spent a lot of time there. For the most part, we just passed thru the area heading for different jobs.

I did spend one night up in the cooking area, but I must have been pushing a broom as I don't remember why I was there. What was cool about the area, was that this was where the sugar water was cooked until it grew crystals. They had tall tanks that reached up 2 floors at least. At the base of them were lots of valves and of all things a microscope built into the side. The crew that worked here actually were the quality control people. They would sample the sugar water within the tanks and they would look into the tanks via the scopes. Once the sugar water meet certain standards, they would just stand there peering into the tanks. What they were watching for was sugar crystals to grow to a certain size. Once they meet a size standard, they would holler out “dump it”, and at least two of them would start to open the tank valves and allow all the sugar to dump into a centrifuge system below.

This raw sugar also contained the molasses that came naturally with the sugar process. The water and molasses was extracted via the centrifuge process leaving behind the pure white sugar that we are all use to using. This white sugar would spin up to high-speed, drying as much as it could. Then the drum would slow and a guy would reach down into the spinning drum with a paddle. What he was doing was cutting the sugar away and it would drop ito the next floor where the shaker tables where.

Shaker tables were nothing more then large wooden tables with a fine mesh for the bottom and a canvas top. Inside were stainless steel ball bearings being shaken about. The warm sugar entered one end and was bashed until it would pass thru the mesh.

Next step was the bagging and warehousing.