Post #361353 by The Gnomon on Fri, Feb 15, 2008 12:03 PM

Well, I shot myself in the foot trying to force four pounds of sugar (64 oz) into 18 oz of water.

In an effort to give Scottes a general idea of what proportions go into the RCS, I measured the capacity of my canning jar (52 oz) and I started with 25% water in volume (13 oz). I usually get smaller packages of sugar, but this time I decided to try the 64 oz bag of Food Whole's 365 Brand Organic Cane Sugar.

I have a beaker-like measuring cup that has graduations for sugar measurement. Can't go by that. I use a variety of sugars and those graduations never seem to match the contents of any package. It's probably designed for processed white sugar, which I don't use. Anyway, the most accurate measurement is whatever it says on the package. They never short change you, nor do they throw in extra.

The amount of sugar "product" you can force into a specific quanity of water varies from one type and/or brand of sugar to the next. By the time I had stirred in three sets of 16 oz according to my measuring cup, this batch was becoming very unstable. I still had lots of room in the jar. I added 5 oz more of water, bringing the water content up to 18 oz (slightly over 33% of the capacity) and was able to add more sugar.

By the time it reached the same degree of supersaturation that I had attained before I added the extra water, I still had not yet filled the jar. I don't like having an open package of sugar lying around, so I stirred faster (another technique for forcing more sugar in; heat and stirring speed). Well, I never got all four pounds in before I called it quits.

This morning after it had a chance to cool overnight, I can see that it is so unstable that rock candy is already forming, suspended in the syrup. That's kind of hard to do using the jar method because of the heating limitations. But because I was a stirring so intensely to try to finish off the sugar package (and know that I had used 64 oz exactly) I made it way too unstable for everyday use.

Tonight I'll decant some, since I'm out, heat it up again, add more water, and the rest of the sugar. Unfortunately, that will screw up the measurements, so I I'm doing the measurements, it will be a little while before I make another batch.