How To Get The Finest Grains Of Salt And Sugar
Salt was once so valuable that only kings and queens had it on their tables. They would trade this seasoning for things that were equally precious, such as gold, to fund wars and make weapons. Sugar was also important, but more easily extracted because it could be grown and not mined.
Regardless of which of these edible flavoring sources, they both require some milling. However, if you want and need ultra-fine grains of salt or sugar, you will need mechanical milling companies to do it for you. Here is how they get the finest grains of salt and sugar for human consumption.
From Raw to Refined
Salt
Salt is a mineral found in a calcified form underground. It has to be mined, washed, and then ground up. As a "rock," it already goes through a milling process to make it small enough to sprinkle on your meat and potatoes. When you want it ultra-fine, salt spends a much longer time in the mechanical milling machines, which grind it and grind it until it becomes wispy on a puff of air.
Sugar
Sugar is different. The sugarcane has to be stripped, boiled, mashed, and strained. The remaining mash is cooked until there is no "juice" left. Then it is dried into a hardened, almost candy-like substance. At this stage, sugar in the raw is not white at all. It is off-white to brownish in color from the cooking process. The hard chunks of sugar are tossed into a milling machine, where the chunks are broken up and broken down into the fine grains you recognize. The next stage is to "bleach" it to become the white sugar you recognize, but the rise in demand for "raw" sugar has caused much sugar product to remain unbleached/unprocessed.
To refine sugar into even tinier particles, very small batches of sugar are placed into a small milling machine. The machine uses steel balls rotating inside a drum to pulverize the sugar crystals. It is important that the miller not pulverize the sugar too much, or the crystals become so broken that you get powdered sugar. Of course, if that is what you had wanted in the first place, you are fine.
Buying Your Fine-Milled Salt and Sugar
You can either order fine-milled salt and sugar from companies that produce them, or you can buy large quantities of these edible seasonings in the raw and send them to a milling factory. With the latter, you should expect some impurities, since the milling company does not process the salt or sugar before or after milling. Most people opt for the former since it is easier to find those products for purchase.
Contact a company like Allied High Tech for more information and assistance.
