Rock candy — also called rock sugar, sugar candy or, in its lump form, misri or nabat — is confectionery made from pure sucrose grown into unusually large, glassy crystals. A supersaturated sugar syrup is left to cool and evaporate slowly around a seed surface — a stick, a length of string, or existing crystals in a pan — and over days the dissolved sugar organises itself into hard, translucent crystals many times the size of ordinary table sugar. The result is eaten as a candy on a stick, dropped into hot tea and coffee as a slow-dissolving sweetener, sold as loose amber or white "rock sugar" for Asian cooking, and used to demonstrate crystal growth in classrooms. It is chemically almost nothing but sugar, yet its crystalline coarseness gives it a clean, hard crunch and a slow, lingering sweetness quite unlike granulated sugar.