What is raw sugar?
Raw sugar is coarse, tan to brown-colored sugar (sucrose) which results from the first processing of cane or beet sugar. True “raw sugar” cannot be sold in the USA because it contains impurities such as soil, mold yeast, bacteria, and wax. When further processed to remove the impurities it is sold as turbinado sugar.
Raw sugar is cane sugar which has been minimally processed. The precise definition varies, depending on who you talk to. Adherents to a raw food diet, for example, may have very specific definitions which involve temperature and handling, while others may view any sort of lightly refined sugar as raw sugar. In all cases, raw sugar is the product of the first stage of the cane sugar refining process, and as a result it has some very distinctive characteristics. Sugarcane is a type of grass which grows in the tropics. People in India and parts of Asia realized that sugarcane was naturally very sweet thousands of years ago, and they started pressing it for the sweet juice and refining the result. Given that raw sugar requires minimal processing, the raw sugar we consume today is probably very similar to that made in India hundreds of years ago. When Europeans started to explore Asia, one of the first products they were introduced to was sugar, and it proved to be a big hit; it was also on
