Making Sugar | from | Sugar Beets | Our First Time Making Sugar From Sugar Beets 

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!

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.

Thank you! We are glad you enjoyed it

It was a great experiment. We were happy with the results and to be honest it was very little effort, just waiting lol

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!

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!

It worked Great! This year we grew a lot and are going to make syrup which we are quite excited for.

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

You are most welcome. We enjoyed this experiment 😀

It has been a very interesting project. We are so pleased with the results.

It is,and we are so glad it worked. Looking forward to trying again this year.

Our small crop for this year is looking good. We are excited to get it out and try a few different things with it.

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! 😃

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.

We were pleasantly surprised to be honest. I did not think that we would get that much.

Thanks so much 😃

We hope it works well for you. We definitely find the sugar beets worthwhile.

Thanks so much for watching

Thank you 😃

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.

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.

Most welcome 😃. Thank you so much for watching

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 😁

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!)

It was a fun experiment and we still have to process our beets from this year.

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.

In typical us fashion, we were late on every step. So hopefully this year we will improve in growth and timing.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

So glad you enjoyed, and welcome 😃. Shall definitely stop by

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.

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 :)

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!

There have been many suggestions. We are going to try a coffee grinder this year and see. The mortar and pestel might work too.

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.

We could certainly try this. We found the silicone trays that were flexible quite helpful.

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?

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.

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.

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.

A good coffee grinder really did the trick. Still summer powder parts, but mostly decent chunks.

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!

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.

Another great idea! We have seen those ice cube trays in the store and we would be able to pop them right out.

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!

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!

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. :)

We switched to a coffee grinder and it works so much better.

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.

Ohhh that is an interesting idea. We are going to try a coffee grinder too as many people have made that suggestion.

Thanks. We had fun with it.

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

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.

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 bought a great grinder and are excited to use it this year on the sugar.

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.

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 🤔 ...

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 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

Excellent. We definitely enjoyed this experiment and are working towards making more.

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.

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.

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

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

@@HickorycroftFarm woohoo