Vol. VII · Starches and Sugars Plate 10 of 11sweeteners, sucralose, aspartame, stevia, erythritol, xylitol, sugar substitutes, bakingMF

Sweeteners.

Replace 100 g of sugar with sucralose and you need a sixth of a gram — and a recipe that has lost a tenth of its weight and every job sugar did.

Sugar in a recipe does far more than sweeten. It adds bulk and volume; it holds water and keeps bakes moist (VII.9); it lowers the freezing point of ice cream (III.7); it browns (VIII) and caramelises (VII.8); it slows gluten and starch, tenderising cakes (VI.10); it feeds yeast; it stabilises egg foams (X.6). Replacing it is never just a matter of sweetness.

Intense sweeteners — sucralose, aspartame, saccharin, steviol glycosides from stevia — are hundreds of times sweeter than sucrose, so a recipe needs only milligrams; they provide none of the bulk or chemistry, and aspartame breaks down in prolonged heat. Sugar alcohols such as erythritol and xylitol are about as sweet or a little less, replace much of the bulk, do not brown, and can cause digestive upset in quantity; xylitol is dangerous to dogs. The workshop replaces the sugar in a recipe.

Below: the grams of each sweetener needed to match the sweetness of the sugar you set, and the bulk the recipe loses (relative sweetness from published approximate values).

What you will learn
Workshop
Approximate relative sweetness against sucrose = 1 (published ranges; perceived sweetness varies with concentration): sucralose 600, saccharin 300, steviol glycosides 250, aspartame 200, xylitol 1.0, erythritol 0.7, honey about 1.1 per gram of its sugars.

Sweetness is the easy part

To match 100 g of sugar you need about 0.17 g of sucralose — a pinch — or about 143 g of erythritol. With sucralose the recipe loses 100 g of bulk: a cake made that way is smaller, drier, paler and tougher, because the sugar was also holding water, browning, tenderising and lowering the gelatinisation temperature. Commercial "baking blends" mix an intense sweetener with a bulking agent (maltodextrin, erythritol) for this reason.

Where sweetness is the only job — a drink, a dressing, stewed fruit — intense sweeteners work well. Where sugar builds structure — meringues, caramel, jams that depend on sugar for setting (X.9), ice cream that depends on it for softness — there is no substitute that does everything; reduce sugar gradually and accept a different result, or choose recipes designed for it. Health decisions about sugar and sweeteners belong with a doctor or dietitian, not a cookbook (XXIII.9).

At the stove

Make a simple sweetened whipped cream with sugar and another with a few drops of a liquid sweetener of equal sweetness. Taste both; then try making a meringue with only the sweetener — it will not stiffen, because sugar is part of its structure.

Saccharin, the first artificial sweetener, was discovered in 1879 by Constantin Fahlberg at Johns Hopkins University when he noticed his hands tasted sweet after a day in the laboratory.

Terms

Intense sweetener
A compound hundreds of times sweeter than sucrose, used in milligram amounts.
Sugar alcohol
A reduced sugar such as erythritol or xylitol; bulkier, does not brown.
Bulking agent
An ingredient that replaces the volume of sugar, such as maltodextrin.
Relative sweetness
Sweetness compared with sucrose (= 1).
Sweeteners replace sweetness, not sugar's bulk, moisture, browning and structure.

Sources

  1. A teaching value chosen for the course: the right order of magnitude and shape, not a measurement of a particular food.