TURNTHE SWEET AROUND
Yes, sugar is bad for you, but it’s also delicious. So can you cut back in your favorite desserts without noticing?
SUGAR: It’s at the core of every celebration, serves as an instant pick-me-up on bad days and, in general, just makes life a little bit sweeter.
It’s also at the center of my baking addiction. While some may find the practice of yoga or meditation calming, when I feel stressed out I take solace in my KitchenAid. Weeks rarely go by when I don’t make cupcakes, cookies or even ice cream — with my friends and colleagues happily enjoying the results.
So I was a little skeptical when I came across the latest baking book from America’s Test Kitchen, “Naturally Sweet: Bake All Your Favorites with 30% to 50% Less Sugar” (Penguin Random House, out now). After all, what’s the point of baked goods without sugar? That’s like french fries without ketchup, or “The O.C.” without Marissa Cooper — it just doesn’t work.
The book takes a number of standard baked goods — from blueberry muffins and apple pie to oatmeal-raisin cookies and red-velvet cupcakes — and removes up to half of the sugar normally found in their traditional recipes. It achieves this by eliminating refined, granulated sugar and replacing it instead with “natural sweeteners,” albeit at a much lower dose.
Some of the natural sweeteners are
pantry staples — think maple syrup and honey — while others are a bit more exotic: Sucanat, coconut sugar and date sugar are not typically stocked at the corner bodega (but they are available at Whole Foods, where they cost nearly twice as much as regular sugar).
I tried three of the recipes in “Naturally Sweet”: the chocolate cake, the chocolatechip cookies and the fresh-fruit tart. The results were mixed (see my reviews right), but I had questions about the book’s premise: Is removing 4 grams of sugar from a batch of peanut-butter cookies so vital to your health? Do you need to trash all the Domino Sugar in your pantry and splurge on “natural” alternatives? Yes and no, say experts. Most people look at nutrition labels and are wary of calories and fat content — but it turns out sugar may be the greatest health risk of all.
“Sugar is two molecules together, glucose and fructose, and it’s the fructose molecule that’s the problem,” says Robert Lustig, MD, a pediatric endocrinologist and author of “Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease.” “When you consume the fructose, it all goes to the liver because it’s the only organ that can metabolize it. It has a limited ability to do so, and if you exceed that point, the liver has to turn the fructose into something else it can deal with — fat.”
This fat can lead to Type 2 diabetes, nonalcoholic fatty liver disease and heart disease; excess sugar has also been proved to cause tooth decay.
What “Naturally Sweet” gets right is limiting the dose of sugar, no matter the form. Take the recipe for a chocolate layer cake, for example. For a two-layer, 9-inch, round cake, the recipe calls for either slightly more than 1 cup of Sucanat, 1 ¼ cups coconut sugar or a scant cup of granulated sugar. Martha Stewart’s recipe for a chocolate cake of the same size, by contrast, calls for 3 cups of sugar.
“Reducing your total daily dose of sugar is the key,” says Lustig.
On the other hand, any supposed health benefits of the sugar substitutions are “complete hogwash,” says Lustig. Natural sweeteners still have the fructose molecule, and thus, still pose a risk to your health; they justt offer a depth of flavor not found in granulated sugar, which allows bakers to get away with using less without sacrificing taste.
But be aware thathat these “natural sweeteners” areare notnot always easy to use. Sucanat comes packaged inin large granules that needed to bebe ground before being used in baking. As a result, I found myself spending nearly an hour pulverizing it by hand in my single-serving mortar and pestle.
Instead, Lustig recommends simply cutting one-third of the granulated sugar out of any recipe. “You won’t lose the texture, and it will actually taste better,” he says. And you’ll save yourself a lot of time and money by doing that instead of shelling out for these alternatives.
Still, I will be more cognizant of how much sugar I’m using going forward, and will scale back as Lustig recommends. After all, I bake to make my friends, family and colleagues happy — not to send them to an early grave.