Hey all! Do any of you know how to make sugar out of fruit juices? That really is all sugar is. But instead of apple juice or orange juice, it is cane juice.
i dont know about making sugar from fruit, but have you heard of stevia? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevia this stuff is crazy, i have a plant of it and its soooo sweet. you can use it as a sugar substitute to some degree. the political controversy over it is interesting (and ridiculous). it just goes to show how big corporations like the ones that make aspartame and other artificial sweeteners have control over government agencies... in the us and canada, this wonderful, natural, calorie free sweetener has to be labeled as a dietary supplement and cannot have any mention on the label of its sweetening capabilities. anyway, you should try growing some if you havnt already its easy to grow and perennial but frost seems to kill it... lol
To make pure sugar, it takes some knowledge of chemistry and extraction processing. example- http://www.sucrose.com/lref.html But to make a crude sugar, you really need to start with something high in sugar in the first place, like sugar cane or sugar beets, idk if most fruits have a high enough sugar content. With sugar beets or cane, just chop it up and put in hot water for a while (hours), then strain the liquid, then boil off the water and evaporate till you get a thick honey-like syrup (it will be about 60% sugar if from sugar beets, but depends on starting material). Here is a recipe from 1881 - http://www.publicbookshelf.com/public_html/The_Household_Cyclopedia_of_General_Information/beetroot_bhi.html
If you dehydrate and dry fruit until it's rock solid and then grind it into a fine powder in a coffee grinder, that would probably be the way to make sugar out of fruit. IDK if that's really worth the trouble, I would just buy a bottle of stevia, lol. Stevia has definatley irritated the FDA and many other powerful entities on the planet...it's actually been made illegal in Norway and several other countries, yet nothing remotely harmful has ever been linked to it...and a gazillion things have been pointed out that are wrong with white sugar or seratonin depleting things like aspartame. Amazing. Stevia is a high end plant to own, it's pretty expensive and just a couple seeds can be pretty pricey. I have a friend who gave me some seeds but I wanna learn how to grow them right before I actually plant them. If you grew that and then dehydrated it and ground it down, that would be an excellent sugar substitute that won't flip your blood sugar out. It's amazing to realize that when you actually try to live just off the Earth, that there is actually no sugar in nature...not even in fruit. North America has the least fruit of any continent and it's definatley not abundant wildly, with the small exception of berries and a few other things. Honey is probably one of the most abundant sweeteners in nature that would be natural to consume in a survival, living off the Earth type of situation.
the native americans tapped trees for their sap .....there are alot of trees that can be tapped not just maples...after collecting the sap it is heated to concentrate the sugars.
Why wouldn't you just use honey? Anything I can think of that needs sugar could easily be made the same using honey. In sauces and soups that require sugar you can use fruit juice, like apple juice and get the same sweetening effects.
