I thought this would be easy enough to look up, but it’s been driving me insane all evening.
If I made a simple syrup using 1 or 2 parts sugar to 1 part water, how would I calculate how much of each I need for Xml of syrup?
All the recipes I’ve looked up just spoke of X parts of sugar and Y parts of water (and generally didn’t list the amount of syrup they produced at the end of it).
Well assuming you are doing the parts by volume - a tablespoon of water is 14.79 grams - the weight of a tablespoon of sugar is 12.55 grams - add the together - you get 27.34 if you want to scale this to a for example - a cup (and this all assumes density is close to 1 - which it should be) -
A cup is ~236 cc which is ~236 grams
Figure out the water using ratio of known
14.79/27.34 = x/236
14.79 * 236 / 27.34
127.66 grams of water
Not sure if this is what you are looking for.
If you took 1 cup of water, and added 2 cups of sugar, wouldn’t that give you 3 cups of syrup? What am I missing?
an experiment will end your torment.
take a measuring cup of water, in a glass measuring cup of larger volume, add the sugar for that volume of water. stir until dissolved. measure the resulting volume.
you can always use that proportional change in the water volume for other amounts.
Also - FWIW - you can get more sugar to disolve if you heat the water - see for example…
Technically the sugar has empty spaces in between - which will disappear when dissolved - it doesn’t make that much of a difference, but some might not realize that on first glance.
When it’s combined, the volume doesn’t stay constant after the sugar dissolves.
Put some water and vodka in two measuring cups, note the volume, then pour one into the other. The whole is less than the sum of the parts.
I am not a chemist, but it seems you’re missing:
a) Assuming the sugar doesn’t dissolve (a bad assumption), then one would expect the water to fill in the space between the sugar granules, so you’d have a little more than 2 cups of syrup (or slurry), and
b) the sugar will dissolve, allowing a more compact arrangement of water and sugar, which IIRC (again, IANAC) will result in a solution near the volume to the solvent, or a little more than 1 cup of a syrup that is much more dense than water.
To the OP, you should be able to work it out if you can weigh some prepared syrup of a specified volume and work out the density. Be sure to note the temperature as well. If you heated it to aid dissolution and you intend to use it at room temperature, you should wait until it cools down before taking your measurement.
Yes, intuitively I would expect 2 cups of water plus 1 cup of sugar to yield only a little more than 1 cup of syrup. It’s easy enough to find out empirically; unfortunately I’m not near a kitchen to try it right now. Come on, somebody, fight ignorance!
What the OP wants to know is: what is the volume of that 27.34 grams of syrup?
There’s gotta be a handbook that lists this sort of stuff, no?
I think the calculator at the bottom of this page does what the OP is looking for, albeit indirectly. The degrees brix of a solution is the percentage by weight that is composed of sugar, and the calculator gives you the density. So, for example:[ul][]100 mL table sugar is about 159 g; 100 mL of water is 100 g.[]A solution made of the two would therefore be 159/259 = 61.4°Bx.[]According to the calculator, a 61.4°Bx solution has a density of 1330 kg/m[sup]3[/sup], or 1.33 g/mL.[]The solution weighs 259 g, so its volume is therefore 259/1.33 = 195 mL.[/ul]Similarly, a syrup composed of 200 mL of sugar and 100 mL of water would be 75.5°Bx, have a density of 1.52 g/mL, and have a volume of about 268 mL.
That sounds perfect (it’s been a long time since A level chemistry…).
I was hoping it would be something simple along the lines of water being able to dissolve up to X g/ml of sugar and anything after that adding to the volume…
Of course, in my calculations I used the density of a solid sugar block, not the average density of granulated sugar. (Granulated sugar, of course, contains a lot of air when it’s sitting in your measuring cup.) The density of granulated sugar is closer to 90 g/100 mL, so running through the numbers again:
[ul][]100 mL sugar + 100 mL water is 47.3°Bx, which is 1.23 g/mL, which is 154 mL.[]200 mL sugar + 100 mL water is 64.2°Bx, which is 1.38 g/mL, which is 202 mL.[/ul]
For any amount of sugar and water you will have either more syrup than you need, or less.
“Twice the volume of the water” should work as a rule of thumb (I can ere on the side of caution and make slightly too much). Thanks for the help!
The numbers from MikeS would suggest that it’s syrup = water + sugar/2 for a simple rule of thumb.
[quote=“MikeS, post:14, topic:656520”]
Of course, in my calculations I used the density of a solid sugar block, not the average density of granulated sugar. (Granulated sugar, of course, contains a lot of air when it’s sitting in your measuring cup.) The density of granulated sugar is closer to 90 g/100 mL, so running through the numbers again:
[ul][li]100 mL sugar + 100 mL water is 47.3°Bx, which is 1.23 g/mL, which is 154 mL.200 mL sugar + 100 mL water is 64.2°Bx, which is 1.38 g/mL, which is 202 mL.[/ul][/li][/QUOTE]
So that seems to imply that if you add granulated sugar to water in anything much more than a 2:1 ratio, the volume of the syrup will be less than the volume of the sugar. (Assuming enough water to dissolve it.)
I just tested this out. FOR SCIENCE!!!
50ml of sugar (I only had caster sugar, which is presumably rather denser than granulated, as the grains are smaller).
Add sugar to water and get approx 80ml before mixing.
The sugar didn’t want to dissolve very easily so I warmed the mixture in the microwave, and the volume didn’t appear to change once it dissolved - there’s still about 80ml of syrup.
So, taking into account that 50ml of caster sugar will have a bit more actual sugar in it than 50ml of granulated (less air in the gaps), I think the “water + sugar/2” ratio is a pretty good approximation.
Hmm, in that case, I’ve just worked out that for a recipe (I’m making a liqueur and wanted to make sure it was roughly 20% alcohol by volume) I need 612.5 ml of syrup (since I’m using 700ml of 37.5% dark rum as the base).
So that would be [612.5/2 = 306.25ml] of water, plus [612.5ml = 582.5g] caster sugar?
