It’s gooey. It resembles tar.
It smells wonderfully sweet and coopery. It tickles the tongue with a sweet,
almost tangy taste. It’s a distinct, yet
almost indescribable flavor. It’s a key ingredient in many holiday treats.
Molasses!
The word molasses comes from
the Portuguese word ‘melaco’, which is ultimately derived from ‘mel’, the Latin
word for honey. But make no mistake. This is not honey. It’s a far cry from
honey, in fact. Molasses is a great
substitute for honey and even maple syrup. Molasses comes, mostly, from sugar
cane. The process of creating molasses actually led to the discovery of rum!
But that’s a whole other story! Let’s stick to the deliciously dark wonders of
molasses.
The pressing of cane to produce cane juice and then boiling the juice until it crystallized was developed in India as early as 500 B.C. However, it was slow to move to the rest of the world. In the Middle Ages, Arab invaders brought the process to Spain. A century or so later, Christopher Columbus brought sugar cane to the West Indies. Another two hundred years later, sugar cane cuttings were planted in New Orleans. Molasses figured prominently in the infamous slave trade triangles of the late seventeenth century. English rum was sold to African slave traders who brought slaves to the West Indies and then brought West Indian molasses back to England.
In the sugar cane processing plant, extraction can be done in one of two ways: diffusion or milling. The sugar cane stalks are loaded onto conveyer belts and subjected to hot water sprays to remove dirt and other field debris. Then, they are passed under rotating knife blades that cut the stalk into short pieces or shreds. By the diffusion method, the cut stalks are dissolved in hot water or lime juice. In the milling process, the stalks are passed under several successive heavy rollers, which squeeze the juice out of the cane pulps. Water is sprayed throughout the process to facilitate the dissolving of the juice. Locals and many visitors to the Caribbean and other islands have long enjoyed the taste of fresh sugar cane juice made by a hand turned mill or press. Just imagine that on a larger scale. Before the creation of harvesting machinery, laborers performed the back-breaking work of cutting and stripping the sugarcane by hand. Mule-driven mills pressed the sugar cane to release the syrup, which was then cooked in large kettles over a fire until thickened.
The extracted juice is clarified by
adding milk of lime and carbon dioxide. Hold on…what is ‘milk of lime’, you
ask? It may not be what you’re thinking. Milk
of lime is used in the clarification process. Essentially burnt limestone rock,
it is produced in the factory by heating lime rock in a super heated over or
kiln. The lime rock is then mixed with sweet water—a byproduct of a previous
clarification process. Carbon dioxide is released in the lime milk process. It
is purified in tanks and also used in to clarify the sugar juice. The juice is piped into a decanter, heated and mixed with lime.
The juice passes through carbon filters, producing a mud-like substance. Called
carb juice, this mud is pumped through a heater and then to a clarifying
machine. Here the mud settles to the bottom and the clear juice is piped to yet
another heater and treated again with carbon dioxide. Once again the mud is
filtered out, leaving a pale yellow liquid called thin juice. The juice is
pumped into an evaporator that boils the juice until the water dissipates and
the syrup remains. The syrup is concentrated through several stages of vacuum
boiling, a low temperature boil to avoid scorching the syrup. Eventually, the
sugar crystallizes out of the syrup, creating a substance called massecuite.
The massecuite is poured into a centrifuge to further separate the raw sugar
crystals from the syrup. In the centrifuge, the sugar crystals fall away from
the syrup that is being spun at a significant force. This remaining syrup is
molasses, and it is forced out through holes in the centrifuge. The molasses is
piped to large storage tanks. It is then pumped, as needed, to the bottling
machine where pre-measured amounts of molasses are poured into bottles moving
along a conveyer belt.
Crazy molasses fact: The
Great Boston Molasses Tragedy!*
THE DATE was January 15, 1919, a Wednesday. It was about
half-past noon. In Boston's industrial North End, folks were going about their
business as usual. Only one small detail seemed out of the ordinary, and that
was the temperature — unseasonably warm, in the mid-40s, up from a frigid two
degrees above zero just three days before. The sudden thaw had lifted
everyone's spirits. To anyone who was out on the street that day, it scarcely
seemed a harbinger of disaster. But trouble was brewing fifty feet above street
level in the form of a cast-iron tank containing two-and-a-half million gallons
of crude molasses. The molasses, owned by the United States Industrial Alcohol
Company, was slated to be made into rum, but this particular batch would never
make it to the distillery. At about 12:40 p.m. the giant tank
ruptured, emptying its entire contents into Commercial Street in the space of a
few seconds. The result was nothing less a flash flood consisting of millions
of gallons of sweet, sticky, deadly goo. The Boston Evening Globe
published a description based on eyewitness accounts later that day:
Fragments of the great tank were
thrown into the air, buildings in the neighborhood began to crumple up as
though the underpinnings had been pulled away from under them, and scores of
people in the various buildings were buried in the ruins, some dead and others
badly injured. The explosion came without the slightest warning. The workmen
were at their noontime meal, some eating in the building or just outside, and
many of the men in the Department of Public Works Buildings and stables, which
are close by, and where many were injured badly, were away at lunch. Once the
low, rumbling sound was heard no one had a chance to escape. The buildings
seemed to cringe up as though they were made of pasteboard.
The bulk of the devastation was caused by a "wall of
molasses" at least eight feet high — 15, according to some bystanders —
which rushed through the streets at a speed of 35 miles per hour. It demolished
entire buildings, literally ripping them off their foundations. It upended
vehicles and buried horses. People tried to outrun the torrent, but were
overtaken and either hurled against solid objects or drowned where they fell.
More than 150 people were injured. 21 were killed.
The story isn't an
urban legend per se, though there is a longstanding folk belief associated with
it: On hot, summer days in one of the oldest neighborhoods in Boston, they say,
a faint, sickeningly-sweet odor wafts up from cracks in the pavement — the
stench of 85-year-old molasses....
*{Story courtesy of http://urbanlegends.about.com/od/historical/a/molasses_flood.htm}
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