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About Sugar Cane

Uses of Cane

Growing Cane

Refining Cane

Producers

Primitive Cane Confections

Sacharum. officinarum in all its forms was a very important part of the primitive diet. Chewing the peeled, raw cane was probably the only way natives used its sweetness. Chewing accounts for a very large part of consumption, and the rest is made into a confection-like block that is named and shaped differently in different countries but results from open-pan boiling down of the squeezed-out juice.

In South America the commonest name is "panela," but Venezuela also produces a rather large beautiful, orange-colored cone called "papilon." . In Colombia, one form of panela is a hemispherical loaf of rather large crystals of sugar held together by a small residue of molasses, which is very clean and very light colored. It, too, is called "panela."

One producer in Ecuador mixes peanuts with the boiled-down sugar to make a highly nutritious bar, called "raspadura." In Colombia, some mills mix ground up coconut without the milk with the panela, and this product is called "chancaca" or sometimes "cocada.".

In India, and probably in many other parts of the Orient, the product is called "jaggery," or sometimes "gur" or "gul." The finished products are bright orange in colour, smaller in size than those of South America, usually about 3 cm square at the top, about 4 to 5 cm at the bottom, and about 6 to 7 cm high. It is delicious.

All of these products are the result of open-pan boiling, in contrast to the vacuum pans of modern mills. By far the best varieties for this are the noble canes, but any high-purity cane does as well.

Another general use made of sugarcane throughout the world is as a source of heat. In primitive countries where labour is very cheap, dead leaves are taken from the growing plants and used as a source of heat for cooking, boiling the open-pan evaporators, and so on. Often the people collecting these "dead" leaves take some that still have life in them and not infrequently, as a result, the enclosed bud begins to grow a very undesirable situation especially where panela or jaggery is to be made.

Large-Scale, Modern Uses

Bagasse resulting from the crushed cane is used as fuel to run the mills and often to make electricity. It is commonly used for various building boards whose acoustical properties make them very desirable for homes, offices, and other buildings. Bagasse is also used for manufacturing paper and cardboard .

Finally, the most important product from sugarcane is sucrose.