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Can we make sugar from skirret root?

Nancy Reading

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In a cool damp climate being self sufficient in sugar can be a challenge. It has been used as a preservative since antiquity. I've tried growing sugar beet in the past, and the results were not very satisfactory - the roots grew fine, but extracting and refining the sugar to a point where it was useful was beyond my skills at the time. I was surprised to find out how sugar rich skirret actually is, although I knew it was called the equivalent of 'sugar root' in several European languages.
From this abstract

the root has a greater content of dry matter (16% average) and is rich in sugars especially sucrose (65% of dry matter).

The sugar content isn't quite as high as you might think in the actual root: 65% of 16% is 10.4%, so still pretty high.
sugar beet has between 12 and 21% according to Sugar beet

For reference, the sugar content of other roots (raw) from nutitionvalue.org

carrots: 4.7
beetroot 6.8g
parsnip 4.8g
sweet potato 4.2g
rutabaga 4.5g

Has anyone actually tried to extract sugar from skirret root? I'm keen to hear of any successes or failures before I start playing.

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Ac Baker

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I'm guessing much of the time, the skirrit would be used like carrot, rather than to make crystalline sucrose.

I found this paper about extracting sucrose, glucose & fructose from carrots with an interesting abstract:

Sucrose, glucose, and fructose extraction in aqueous carrot root extracts prepared at different temperatures by means of direct NMR measurements
Cazor et al. 2006

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jf060144i

"[In] Solutions obtained by heating carrot roots in water (stocks) ..

"The concentrations of these three sugars reached a maximum after 9 h when the temperature of treatment was 50 or 75 °C. At 100 °C, the sucrose concentration reached a maximum after 3 h, whereas the concentration of glucose and fructose was still increasing at that time."

This makes me wonder if you could simmer the mascersted skirrit root overnight in the woodstove, and then measure the specific gravity to estimate the concentration of sugars? This 'stock' could be used as a partial replacement for some of the sugar & water in a strongly flavoured chutney, at the very least.

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Nancy Reading

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Hi Ac! Cooking in water is one way of extracting the sugar. It is interesting that the available sucrose seems to stabilise in the water after three hours. That seems like a long time! did they macerate the carrots to maximise the surface area?
I'm inclined to start with trying to juice the roots first. I have a little hand juicer and that will avoid having more water to remove.

A syrup certainly has culinary uses. I think that one that is strong enough to keep well will be fairly viscous so I may go by eye/taste to start with. I was thinking that a refractometer might be useful for assessing root crop nutritional value and it would be invaluable for this too. I do have a hygrometer, but it needs quite a volume of liquid - any ideas of more simple ways of measuring density of liquids?

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Ac Baker

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Nancy Reading wrote:Hi AC! Cooking in water is one way of extracting the sugar. It is interesting that the available sucrose seems to stabilise in the water after three hours. That seems like a long time! did they macerate the carrots to maximise the surface area?

I've finally managed to find the full paper for free (not behind a paywall):

https://ucanr.edu/datastoreFiles/608-463.pdf

which says: "Each carrot was cut lengthwise into four parts to ensure homogeneous material was being compared. These four parts were cut lengthwise into disk sectors of a 5.5 mm thickness (to minimize edge effects)."

Nancy Reading wrote:I'm inclined to start with trying to juice the roots first. I have a little hand juicer and that will avoid having more water to remove.

Since I don't have the figures for skirret (!), I thought carrot might give us a rough idea of the efficiency. Bao & Chang 1994 estimate the sugar content of juiced carrots as c. 8-9% reducing sugars (https://ift.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1365-2621.1994.tb14666.x) which suggests you've extract the non-reducing sucrose more efficiently than the reducing glucose & fructose. Other sources say, carrots are 90 +/- 5% water, and have c. 4 +/- 0.5 g of sugars per 100g and carrot juice has 4 g sugars per 100 g, and has a density of around 1.01442 g/cm3.

So it sounds like juicing works pretty efficiently for extracting sucrose from carrots.

Given the high proportion of sucrose in skirret, as long as the flavour isn't a problem, skirret juice sounds promising for reducing the need to add 'shop bought' sucrose to wet dishes!

Nancy Reading wrote:A syrup certainly has culinary uses. I think that one that is strong enough to keep well will be fairly viscous so I may go by eye/taste to start with. I was thinking that a refractometer might be useful for assessing root crop nutritional value and it would be invaluable for this too. I do have a hygrometer, but it needs quite a volume of liquid - any ideas of more simple ways of measuring density of liquids?

It's much easier to compare densities, than to exactly measure them, of course! You could I guess calibrate a kitchen balance between water at the light end of the calibration line, and a stable syrup (e.g. golden syrup, which consists of fructose, glucose & sucrose with a density of around 1.430 g/cm3) at heavy end?

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Nancy Reading

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I'll post some pictures later (when I can find the camera lead...) but thought I'd note down my progress so far.

I dug up 4 rather congested skirret plants today, separating just over 1 kg of useful roots. They snap off fairly easily and the plant can then be divided and replanted. I washed the mud off the roots in my water terraces and gave them a final rinse in the stream. There was maybe a bit of dirt still in the root creases, but fairly clean. I (eventually) found my hand cranked vegetable juicer and fed the skirret roots through. The good news is that the root goes through the juicer really easily. The bad news is that the juice doesn't really flow well. It is rather pulpy, so although some dryish pulp is pushed out the end, the juice that drips out the other end is still rather thick and pulpy. There is no way a viscosity test would give an accurate estimate of sugar content, as the density is increased by the pulp content. Tasting the juice and comparing it to the dry pulp indicates that most of the sugar is in the juice however. The juice is much sweeter to taste. I got about 1 UK pint / 500ml of pulpy juice, and about 20 ounces of dryish pulp from my roots.

I have made an experimental cake (no added sugar :P ) from the dry pulp. I'll post the recipe for that separately after I've tasted it. The rest of the juicy pulp and dry pulp are currently in the fridge whilst I consider my next move, and ask for advice here. At the moment I'm thinking of just processing the juice as it is - warming it on the stove on a gentle heat to dry it. I'll just see what happens as it dries out. I don't think there is really enough to try too many ways of processing it, and for most of my uses a bit of extra fibre, given the flavour is pretty neutral, won't be a problem.

I may have enough plants left to try pressing the juice out using a press and cloth like for cider. I feel like that will be a more wasteful process (so much is left in the cloth) but ought to give a 'cleaner' juice as a result.

Any thoughts or suggestions so far?

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C Murphy

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Not sure about skirret, but our pressed apple juice was so sweet this year that I experimented with cooking a gallon or so down into a molasses. It's tough to get there without it turning gelatinous from the pectin, but the result was a lovely sweet syrup. I'm sure something similar would be possible with skirret juice.

Nirmal Vidura

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I haven’t tried extracting sugar from skirret myself, but it’s definitely an intriguing idea! Skirret’s sugar content is impressive, and with its long history as a "sugar root," it seems worth experimenting with.

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Nancy Reading

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Pictures as promised:

digging_skirret_in_winter.jpg

skirret_root_clump.jpg

skirret_offset.jpg

washing_skirret_roots.jpg

juicing_skirret.jpg

skirret_pulp_juice.jpg

skirret_pulp_cake.jpg

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Ac Baker

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Wonderful! How is the cake?!?!

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Nancy Reading

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Ac Baker wrote:Wonderful! How is the cake?!?!

Actually not half bad! It has turned out a little dense perhaps. I'm going to start a new thread on cooking with skirret to avoid derailing this one.

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Staff note (Nancy Reading) :

New thread for skirret root recipes: https://permies.com/t/272656/Cooking-Skirret-root

Nancy Reading

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C Murphy wrote:Not sure about skirret, but our pressed apple juice was so sweet this year that I experimented with cooking a gallon or so down into a molasses. It's tough to get there without it turning gelatinous from the pectin, but the result was a lovely sweet syrup. I'm sure something similar would be possible with skirret juice.

Thanks for sharing your experience! I don't think skirret has pectin in so it oughtn't to gel. There is something jelly like in the 'juice' I have though - it still has quite a bit of fibre in I think. I think I will try cooking it down though and just see what happens.

Next time I will try cooking in water and straining off the roots. I didn't want to do that since it seems poor practice to add more water just to remove it later, but it may be the only way of getting clean sugar. The fibre may not matter, depending on what I'm likely to do with the sugar. It wouldn't matter in jams or baking. Maybe not so good in cordials though, but they often get strained anyhow.

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C. Lee Greentree

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posted 2 months ago

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Looking through this thread, I am impressed by your patience! I'm feeling very labor-averse at the moment, so this has me thinking of more direct, much less fiddly ways to use the sugar inside. Perhaps the roots could be finely grated and mixed with a sour fruit, then baked in a pie? Add grated to (pan)cake batter, cook with grains for porridge, etc?

I have some skirret seeds (that I hope are still good!) and maybe someday will be able to experiment with my own!

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William Bronson

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I wonder if steam juicing would extract more sugars than mechanical juicing?

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Ulla Bisgaard

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What I perfect “for me now” thread to find. One of my experiments this year, is sweeteners. I am not saying sugar, since I don’t think it’s necessary, for my needs, to cook it down that much.
I am growing sugar beets and yes skirrets, right now, and I am growing sugar cane sorghum this warm and hot season. My plan is to use my juicer to get the sugar out.
It will be fun seeing how this turns out for everyone

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Nancy Reading

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So unfortunately it hasn't been as successful as I'd hoped.

Since there was still so much fibre in the 'juice' I decided to try extracting the sugar out of half of it to get a purer product. I added about the same volume of water to it, brought it to the boil and then strained through a muslin cloth. I actually squeezed the cloth quite hard to get as much juice out as possible (hot!). Then I put each part of the juice in a separate pan got them hot on the stove and simmered for a bit. I didn't want to leave them on the hot plate over night, so I first put them on the warm surface adjacent to the hot plate (which i use to melt chocolate, too hot to touch, but never boiing) and then in the bottom oven with the door ajar (which is where I put things like sliced apples, herbs, other fruit to dry - maybe 90 degrees Celsius) and left it for another day and night. Both mixtures got darker in colour. I thought I could see some crystalisation on the one that had the extra fibre in, but in the end it just went to a dark coloured biscuit. The one that was strained first started to get a thicker skin, and then went to a solid gummy layer.

It is possible that if I had stopped it earlier I might have got a syrup that could be usefully stored and used, as it is I have something that slightly resembles treacle toffee, but not really useful as a cooking ingredient.

If I were to try it again, I think I would actually go back to cooking the roots to extract the sugar as per Ac's carrot reference. I'm not sure about steam juicing as William suggests - I know you can get equipment to juice berries, but I'm not sure how they work, and whether that would help. Maybe I need to read more on the process with sugar beets, but there just seemed to be too much jelling going on, some sort of gum in the root that stops the solution crystallising.

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Ac Baker

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Ah! Chapter 5 (V) of this book scanned here, Simple Substances p180

Skirret sugar From the root 1 lb yields 6 drachms
https://digital.ub.uni-duesseldorf.de/download/pdf/1496641.pdf

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Nancy Reading

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Interesting find Ac! (I must see is there is anything in my pharmacopia)

Converting to digital

1lb= 454g
6 drachms= 23.3g

so 1kg could give 1000*(23.3/454) = 51g

Hmm, that is only 5% by total mass, which is half what the previous reference suggested - no more than carrots for example (although yield is not equal to content of course)

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Ulla Bisgaard

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I would stick to syrups. For most things, it’s easy to substitute a dry sugar for a syrup. That’s my plan for my sugar beets and sorghum. I will filter it first and then cook it down to a syrup.
If I want a dry sugar, I think making rock sugar will be the easiest method to use. It takes time, but it’s not hard to do. In my experience it’s actually harder to avoid LOL. The syrups I end up with, when I candy fruits, almost always ends up growing rock sugar.
Boiled sugar works are hard to do, since you have to keep a close eye on the temperature constantly. If too high, the sugar will burn, too low and you get goob. I don’t have the patience for that.
Making rock sugar is easy, you boil the liquid down to a syrup, sprinkle in a few sugar crystals, and then let it sit and grow. It takes time, but since it’s just sitting there, it’s not a problem. Then, the rock sugar can be broken up with a hammer. It’s also beautiful. There is something aesthetically beautiful looking at the crystals growing.
Here is a video about processing sugar canes, that I really like, since it shows several different ways to do it.

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Ac Baker

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These look like pretty thorough instructions about how to make a brown crushed pourable sugar from sugar beets at home:
https://www.instructables.com/Making-Sugar-From-Sugar-Beets/

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John Weiland

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Adding some notes and links to this thread....

Nancy, you may wish at some point to look back into sugar beet even as you keep experimenting with skirret. Sugar beet has a reasonably long history in both breeding efforts and extraction technology to draw on, some of which can make its way back to the home kitchen. I notice here [ https://www.nnfcc.co.uk/publications/report-sugar-beet-scotland ] that Scotland as a nation was trying to re-boot their beet sugar industry, but this is focused in the east, I assume due to soil fertility and infrastructure??.... But just to say that your Isle of Skye soils may provide some challenges although a Permie soil-health approach may be able to remedy that rather quickly. And note the natural history of Beta maritima, the 'sea beet' [ https://botsocscot.wordpress.com/2021/08/22/plant-of-the-week-23rd-august-2021-sea-beet-beta-vulgaris-ssp-maritima/ ] and indeed the original form from which sugar beet was bred to realize its present day form, productivity, and efficacy for sugar extraction. Thus, many factors and influences have impacted sugar beet to become the second most important source of purified sucrose next to sugar cane globally.

If you return to investigate sugar beet anew, I would recommend tracking down someone at one of the agricultural universities or crop production concerns in Scotland why may be able to suggest beet varieties shown to be well-adapted to your region and yielding good sugar levels. If your original attempts were done using a sugar beet variety from a garden seed catalog, these varieties may be woefully behind in sugar production compared to newer varieties which routinely achieve 16-20% sucrose in northern growing regions. Just as important is the fact that more modern varieties have been selected to reduce impurities during the extraction process, although this by no means has been a deeply targeted area of breeding programs. In addition to resources already mentioned here, I add this one for home sugar extraction.....apologies if already linked: https://www.craftygardener.co.nz/?post_id=26&title=making-sugar-from-homegrown-sugar-beet

Good luck in your endeavors!

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Nancy Reading

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Thanks for the links Ac and John. Skirret has some advantages to me - it is perennial (so I can harvest when I wish) and it seems to like it here. I'm not sure yet about sugar beet. I think I may be a bit less than optimal for it's growing conditions (soil too acidic and cold) that's not to say it wouldn't grow, just that the yield would be less. I think I will try again with skirret, I have some more skirret roots I can harvest, but I'll try to keep more of an eye on the syrup as I am reducing it. Maybe the seeding with sugar crystals would help too.
If the taste is too strong for my husband then I'll probably have a go with sugar beet instead. I remember sugar beet seed being quite difficult to get hold of before (unless you wanted field quantities).

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Jim Woodland

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Hi.
I've got my first skirret crown growing now so hopefully I can have some roots for sugar making in a couple of years. I read a blog from a New Zealand homesteader who was making DIY sugar from sugar beet. She put the chopped the pieces of washed beet in a Steam Juicer to extract the juice. This may be the way to get a clean juice out of the Skirret. I've just bought a Steam juicer after reading about the cool things they can do. Look them up as they might prove useful. Crystallised sugar might be the way for skirret as they have high sucrose levels. I did attempt to make sugar from beet a few years ago but got a bit too technical and did some CO2 bubbling through the sugar solution, which I had added milk of lime. All in all, a bit of a faff for the cup of sugar produced! I have successfully made birch syrup, which is delicious, but it took nearly 100 litres of sap for half a litre of syrup. I'm hoping skirret might be a good bet for a useful amount of sugar compared to input effort. The problem with Sugar Beet is the production of seed. You can't really produce it at home. There are some complicated methods that the commercial growers use for seed production. If anyone knows of a strain of Sugar Beet that can successfully produce seed at home (in the second year), that would be ace. I tried and failed, as did a friend. Good luck with the Skirret sugar. Jim.

John F Dean

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Hi Jim,

Welcome to Permies.

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John Weiland

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Jim Woodland wrote:......... The problem with Sugar Beet is the production of seed. You can't really produce it at home. There are some complicated methods that the commercial growers use for seed production. If anyone knows of a strain of Sugar Beet that can successfully produce seed at home (in the second year), that would be ace. I tried and failed, as did a friend. ....

Hmmmm.....I don't really understand why this would be unless the beet seed or beets that you originally received were 'triploid hybrids'. My recollection was the the US industry had gone to triploids which end up being male sterile in that second year when they bolt and set flowers. But it may be poor recollection that the seed industry in Europe stayed with diploid hybrids. In the diploid case, you should get *some* seed in that second year as long as you had many (greater than ~8-10) plants growing in a patch so that they could inter-pollinate. Only a very few lines of sugar beet are self-fertile....sugar beet is derived from 'sea beet' which most Europeans will be familiar with along the coast lines and it is naturally self-sterile---needs to outcross with neighboring sea beet plants to set viable seed. That said, not all locations around the globe are good choices for seed production, even in regions where the root grow quite well. Where I live, the frost depth can dip down nearly 2 meters into the soil, so the root is killed in winter if left in the garden. The fix is to harvest the roots, root-cellar them for the winter and replant the roots in a group in the spring. They will bolt, set flowers, and generally produce enough seed for another round. Red table beets will work the same way, so may be good to experiment with them if you desire to try again. Good luck....the skirrit tests seem like an intriguing alternative!

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Nancy Reading

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Welcome to permies Jim! and thanks for reminding me that I could have another go at my skirret before they start growing this spring. So much to do now that the days are getting longer - I'll see what I can do later in the week perhaps!

thinks....I wonder if I can rig up a steam juicer with my kitchen pans?

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