Knowledge Base > Deb Kennedy, PhD - Culinary Medicine: Ask Me Almost Anything

Deb Kennedy, PhD - Culinary Medicine: Ask Me Almost Anything
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Question:

What is the best and flavourful substitute for sugar in recipes?
— leanne Ponnusamy
Answer:
I am going to assume you mean baking here, but even if you're not and you're talking about adding something sweet to a savory dish, your best bet is fruit. 'cause fruit comes with the fiber and the phytonutrients and all sorts of healthful nutrients that your body needs. So I like fruit pastes and fruit sauce. Dried fruit is also a good addition when we're talking about adding some savory, um, some sweetness to some savory elements when we're talking about baking. However, there are many things that you can do to increase the sweetness and decrease the amount of sugar that you're gonna be adding. So if that's what you're talking about, I know someone down the list also asked how do you bake with low sugar? Number one sugar is sugar is sugar. So whether you're putting maple syrup, honey, agave, raw cane syrup, uh, raw can sugar, anything like that, you're looking at the amount of glucose, it's the same. Agave is not is one of my least favorite sweeteners 'cause it's very high in fructose and fructose cannot be digested by your body. It gets stored in your liver and you can develop fatty liver disease. So agave is not, in my opinion, in my 30 years of being a PhD nutritionist is not a healthful sweetener. The good thing about when you're looking for sweetness to add to something, you're just, if you're adding sugar, you're adding the taste of sweetness. So follow me here for a second. You've got the taste of sweetness, but if you're using maple syrup or you're using honey, you get flavor in that you're tasting more than just sweetness. You're tasting the incredible back notes of syrup and honey and you need less of it because you're getting more flavor. So that's how that part works. When you're looking at baking, you can substitute maple syrup and honey for the sugar and you need less of it. So that's a way to, to spare some sugar. Also, there's something called the baker's percentage and there's a link on that as well. You look at the amount of flour in a baked product is equaling a hundred percent and the amount, and you're doing it by weight. So the amount of weight of sugar over the amount of weight of flour can help you figure out how much in a recipe can you decrease the amount of sugar and still have a valid product. And it differs whether you're making cookies or brownies or cakes. So that's a really great thing to know. So you've got your healthful fruit paste that you can use in some recipes. You've got some applesauce you can add in. Let's say you're making a tea cake or a zucchini bread and you are, um, wanting to decrease the amount of sugar and increase the flavor. You can add some applesauce and you don't need as much sugar if at all. So those are always, and I'll have to talk about a little bit about alternatives. Artificial sweet, artificially sweetened ingredients like your aspartame, your potassium sulf, uh, potassiums, ace sulfate, all of those that are artificial sweeteners, there's always a caveat there. They all say don't heat this up too much 'cause you're gonna create toxic compounds. I do not believe in my opinion that artificial sweeteners should be used in anyone's diet. And then we have things that are aren't artificially sweetened like monk fruit for a cup of sugar, you need a quarter cup of monk fruit data on that shows that that is a fruit. So it has not been shown to be, uh, damaging to us. And it all depends on your palate. With monk fruit, I can taste the second I swallow something, it leaves this accurate taste in the back of my mouth. But that's me, that's my palate. We all have different palates. All of you on this call have different palates. So monk fruit might be a great thing if you don't have that reaction like I do. And then we have stevia, which is an herb that is, um, used very, very sweet. Um, you have to follow some specific instructions when you are using stevia, you know, basically need very little of it in baking. Uh, it's not, you can tell it's in there, let's just say you can tell it's in there. All right? So that's how you can substitute sugar in recipes.
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