Baking with Less Sugar (3 page)

My dad taught me, “Everything in moderation,” and I try mightily to follow his lead. If I deprive myself of something, especially if it is something that I love, it becomes unbearably appealing—more so than if I had just indulged in a little in the first place. But I know how easy it is to chuck moderation out the window when faced with a tempting treat. As much as I like to preach, “Just take a little! Don't eat the whole thing!” I know that is easier said than done. By minimizing the amount of sweeteners in these pastries, some of the moderating is already done. As someone who pretty much eats only pastries for most of the day, it is a goal of mine to be able to continue to indulge in all of my favorite foods while addressing the issue of too much sugar in my system. I've witnessed firsthand that once you learn to rein in your sugar intake, your palate adjusts to desserts that are not super-sweet, and you end up enjoying these treats much more.

Finally, the best reason for me to create these low-sugar recipes is that they are simply delicious and it was incredibly fun! In 2007, when I was challenged by Bobby Flay in
Throwdown with Bobby Flay
, it was initially set up as a ruse in which I was filming
The Science of Sweets
(see What's Behind the Science of Sweets, page 17)
. I'm fascinated by the alchemy and magic—I guess that's chemistry!—of how the various ingredients in baking all come together to form something so much more than the sum of their parts. Baking with little to no sugar is an extension of that passion. Could I bake desserts and pastries that pass my “can't stop eating it” test but have less sugar?
How
could I do it? What changes would result? Was it just about tricking the palate to adjust to less sugar, or was it possible to simply become accustomed to less-sweet desserts? I've never had as many joys—and crushing failures—in testing recipes as I did here. I've learned so much more than I ever expected and even though this book is done, I'm continuing my quest to give my favorite desserts the low-sugar treatment.

When baking, I am pretty laser focused on one thing—creating pastries that are simply irresistible—and these recipes are no exception. In defining “low sugar” I took a moderate approach, so if you are aiming to reduce the amount of refined white sugar you are baking with, these recipes will help you learn to do so. The working definition for “low sugar” varies by chapter.

In the first chapter, we simply bake with less sugar. Standard recipes like our decadent chocolate brownies get the “low-sugar” treatment, and most recipes contain 100 g/
¹
/
₂
cup of sugar or less with just a few at more than 165 g/
²
/
₃
cup. All of these desserts have at least half the amount of sugar of their full-sugar counterparts. They are not diabetic nor ascetically non-sweet. Instead, they are an introduction to how you can make pastries that still have that WOW! factor while knowing that they contain significantly less sugar than is typical.

Next, we delve into desserts made with bittersweet chocolate. All chocolate, except unsweetened chocolate and cocoa powder, is made with sugar, and you can use that to your advantage to decrease the amount of added sugar in your desserts. These recipes rely on just chocolate as the sweetener for truly indulgent treats, with no additional sugar, allowing you to continue your journey in baking with less sugar. I use a fruity bittersweet chocolate that has a cacao percentage of 68 percent. This means that 68 percent of the chocolate is pure cacao, and the remaining 32 percent is sugar, cocoa butter, and flavorings like vanilla. For each ounce of this chocolate there are approximately 11 grams of sugar, which translates to about 2
¹
/
₂
teaspoons of sugar. I indicate in each recipe the total amount of sugar that comes from the sugar within the chocolate so you can have an idea of how much refined white sugar is in these recipes. Some of the recipes in this chapter use this to full advantage, and the resulting desserts are as rich and decadent as can be. Others skirt the line between sweet enough to just barely sweet; true chocolate aficionados who revel in the flavors of cacao will appreciate these desserts.

Honey as a sweetener headlines the next group of desserts and pastries. Honey has been naturally sweetening desserts for centuries; these recipes often have an old-fashioned and exotic flavor to me, since I grew up really only tasting honey when someone's grandma made a honey cake or when traveling in the Mediterranean where honey desserts are quite common. These recipes use anywhere from 115 g/
¹
/
₄
cup to 225 g/
²
/
₃
cup of honey, with the last two recipes topping out at 340 g/1 cup honey total between cake and frosting.

Next is the chapter on desserts made with maple syrup or molasses or both. Maple syrup is sap that is tapped directly from maple trees in the spring; it lends a gentle, buttery sweetness when used in baking. Molasses is the by-product of the refining of cane or beet sugar and has a strong, sharp flavor that works best in old-fashioned cakes and
puddings. Both have distinctive, delightful flavors that make dreamy no-sugar desserts. Instead of white sugar, we rely on around 160 g/
¹
/
₂
cup to 240 g/
³
/
₄
cup of maple syrup or molasses in the recipes in this chapter, with a few at 320 g/1 cup of total syrup or molasses. It's easy to overdo the sweetness when working with maple syrup because of how pleasing it is, so I created desserts that use maple syrup to highlight other flavors like pears, cranberries, and pumpkin. Molasses is much more potent—a little goes a long way—so we use it sparingly for its spicy punch.

We end with fruit, both fresh fruits and fruit juices. Naturally sweetening your desserts with fruit allows you to avoid white sugar while still creating nostalgic, tantalizing baked goods that no one would guess are sugar-free. I've been a fruit freak my whole life. Despite the fact that I'm surrounded by sugary pastries all day long, my go-to snack is always a piece of fresh fruit. The desserts in here are among my favorite since they allow me to highlight all of the intensely flavorful and wonderful aspects of different kinds of fruit, from dried to fresh to reduced juices.

In 2007, the Food Network contacted me and asked if I would help them by filming the pilot episode of a new series they were starting called
The Science of Sweets
. Would I?! I jumped at the chance to share my passion on how baking is chemistry. I am awed daily by the transformation that occurs each time you mix together butter and sugar and flour and eggs and create something so utterly different than what you start out with. It turns out that the whole Science of Sweets idea was a ruse to prep me for an appearance on
Throwdown with Bobby Flay
. The show was victorious for me (and Chef Flay proved to be an extremely gracious loser), so it all turned out great . . . but boy was I disappointed that we never filmed the original show!

In my mind, sugar was going to be the star of at least one of the episodes of the series for the simple reason that its role in baking is so much vaster than you would think. It does way more than simply add sweetness to a dessert. In fact, if the only challenge in baking without sugar were to teach the palate how to adjust to less sweetness, this would be a very short book. In removing sugar from a pastry, you are not just removing its source of sweetness, you are also changing the chemical nature of your baking, which has numerous unexpected consequences.

Once you learn how sugar works in baking, you'll understand better how removing it affects the shelf life, texture, appearance, and, of course, taste in desserts. Here are the myriad roles that sugar plays in baking.

1. Adds sweetness.
The best-known attribute sugar brings to the table is sweetness. It makes bitter foods more palatable and makes desserts more tempting. It is often considered addictive—the more you eat, the more you want. What your palate reads as “just right” in terms of sweetness is highly malleable as well. You can train yourself to enjoy less sweetness in your pastries simply by eating more and more desserts made with less sugar. Conversely, your palate will crave highly sweetened foods if you regularly present it with such.

2. Attracts and holds moisture.
Sugar is hygroscopic, which means it grabs moisture in the air and absorbs it into your food, making your baked goods moister. It also binds to the water molecules that already exist in your food, thereby slowing moisture loss in that way as well. Both the drawing in of moisture from the air and keeping it within the pastry help prevent staleness and extend shelf life. The desserts in this book do not stay as fresh as those made with loads of sugar, so be sure to share what you've made within a day or two to enjoy them at their best.

3. Aids in browning.
Two different reactions work together to make pastries bake to a lovely golden brown: caramelization and the Maillard reaction. Caramelization takes place when the sugars within a food melt and then create a deep brown color and new flavors. The Maillard reaction is the result of heating together certain sugars and proteins, producing new molecules that are brown in color and rich in flavor. Without sugar, baked goods don't have the necessary ingredient to turn golden brown, and these low-sugar pastries tend to be paler in color. When baking, we often go by color to determine doneness, so in these recipes train your eye to recognize a lighter shade of brown as an indicator of when to pull something from the oven.

4. Tenderizes pastries.
The addition of sugar in a recipe helps to prevent gluten formation. Gluten is the long, stretchy bands of proteins that form when you mix flour and liquid together. In bread making, gluten is ideal; you get hearty, chewy loaves when your dough has a lot of gluten development. In cakes and cookies, however, gluten is the enemy, leading to tough and dense desserts. Sugar acts like a shield between flour and liquid, preventing gluten strands from developing. The more sugar in your product, the less likely you will end up with something tough. The sweetest of cakes and cookies are often touted for their melt-in-your-mouth, velvety qualities.

5. Makes pastries crispy.
Sugar liquefies in the oven when it is in a pastry dough or batter. If there is a lot of sugar, it recrystallizes as water is gradually removed during baking through evaporation, and the result is a lovely crisp texture. At the extreme, sugar by itself turns to caramel, which hardens completely upon cooling. Baking with less sugar means that you never quite get that crispy, crunchy, sugary snap that you expect in a traditional cookie, but if you adjust your expectations to a softer and cakier mouthfeel, you can still make a great cookie.

6. Lowers the freezing point of frozen desserts.
If you put water in the freezer, you get ice. If you put sugar-water syrup in the freezer, you get slush, or if your mixture is super sugary, it might not freeze up at all. Adding sugar to a liquid makes it freeze at a much lower temperature than if you didn't add sugar. What does this mean for bakers? It means that when you make ice cream, it's the sugar in the ice cream that makes it scoopable and creamy, and not icy and hard as a rock. For ice creams and sorbets made with less sugar, one trick is to add alcohol to the base since alcohol acts like sugar to depress the freezing point.

7. Inhibits coagulation of egg proteins in custards.
Sugar is pesky! In the same way that it gets in the way of gluten development (see Tenderizes pastries, previous), it also keeps the proteins in eggs from bonding together when they are heated so that you can make smooth, creamy custards. Without sugar, custards can get tough and rubbery a lot quicker, so be careful when cooking or baking low/no-sugar custards and pastry creams.

8. Stabilizes beaten egg foams.
When you are whipping up eggs, they get foamy and airy and increase in volume—and then they deflate. If you add sugar, the walls of the bubbles that form when the eggs are beaten strengthen and stiffen; think of sugar like the hair spray of egg foams. You can make meringues (beaten egg whites and sugar), angel food cakes (beaten egg whites, sugar, and flour), meringue buttercreams (beaten eggs, sugar, and butter) all because of this chemical attribute of sugar.

9. Incorporates air into solid fats during the creaming process.
The crystals in sugar are sharp and jagged, and when baking, we use that to our advantage to create numerous microscopic air pockets in solid fats such as butter. When you mix butter and sugar together, the sugar works like an army of little gardeners (stay with me here) wielding millions of hoes and digging into the butter and aerating it. This is a hugely important step in many baking recipes. Creaming butter and sugar together, as this action is called, sets up your pastry to be light and airy and fluffy instead of dense.