When I attended pastry college in Paris a few years in the past, granulated sugar appeared in almost each tart, cookie or mousse recipe we realized. Only some desserts used honey or maple syrup as a replacement.
That’s no shock. Granulated sugar is dessert’s chief sweetener and in addition its secret pinch-hitter. It’s price being particular: granulated sugar is almost pure sucrose, and its distinctive powers have made it the usual for sweetening. It makes baked items moist. It makes muffins and cookies tender. It combines with butter to make frostings fluffy and whips up with egg whites like no person’s enterprise (therefore the cloud-like loft of meringue).
Sugar is essential to dessert as we all know it, however typically it additionally makes me squirm. Sugarcane manufacturing has a huge and damaging ecological footprint worldwide, and overconsumption drives some dietary ailments. I discover what sustainable dessert may imply in my e-newsletter Pale Blue Tart, and I’ve at all times thought well being ought to determine in by some means. Reducing carbon emissions is completely attainable with treats like plant-based loopy cake and a waste-busting granita. So is baking for biodiversity and meals sovereignty. However sugar’s ubiquity makes it onerous to examine a extra healthful future with out it or with much less of it in our favourite treats.
Moderation appeared to me one of the best, albeit least satisfying reply to this challenge till earlier this yr, when pastry chef Brian Levy’s cookbook Good & Candy made me query our reflexive use of white sugar. He did one thing stunning: skipping sugar totally, together with maple syrup, honey and different added sweeteners usually related to a supposedly extra “pure” manner of baking.
As a substitute, his recipes sweeten desserts from pound cake to panna cotta with entire meals: contemporary, dried and freeze-dried fruits; dairy; nuts; sweet-ish flours; and fermented meals – all of that are riotously flavorful. They’re additionally considerably more healthy than added sugars since they arrive packaged with fiber, proteins and starches alongside their naturally occurring sugars.
This was no small accomplishment. As anybody who’s ever thrown warning to the wind and swapped sugar for honey is aware of, it’s difficult sufficient, or typically unimaginable, to re-create sugar’s many features with various sweeteners, which may include different sugars like fructose and glucose.
His e book made me surprise: is dessert over-relying on sugar? Are we neglecting extra flavorful paths towards sweetness? And the way “whole-food” and environmentally acutely aware may dessert get with out shedding its magic?
Levy isn’t the one pastry chef coaxing sweetness out of fruits and different entire meals, imagining sugar as one thing extra like a seasoning slightly than an unquestioned headliner in each dessert. If we needed to, these cooks recommend, we may chill out the all-out devotion to sugar when it is sensible.
Jessica Préalpato, a consulting pastry chef on the Hôtel San Régis in Paris, is amongst cooks who’re much less compelled than pastry traditionalists by refined sugars. She stated by way of e-mail that “fruit picked on the proper time is bursting with sugar”. In her desserts, honey and unrefined sugars play second string to the sweetness and taste of seasonal fruits, even when which means she has to rejigger frequent strategies. Préalpato makes an apricot sorbet by cooking the fruit all the way down to a compote and including pectin, a technique that creates the creaminess usually achieved by including sugar. After the sorbet comes out of the turbine, she tastes it. If want be, she provides a contact of sweetness with honey French dressing.
Pastry chef Angela Pinkerton, who ran the Bay Space bakery Pie Society and can quickly open a bakery within the Hudson valley, thinks folks can be shocked by how a lot sugar goes into a normal rhubarb pie.
“You need rhubarb [pie] to be type of bitter, however you place apple in there so it tempers it a bit, which lets you use much less sugar,” she defined. She makes use of a sweeter apple selection like pink woman or honeycrisp, preroasting half of them to pay attention their taste. That lets her use half the sugar she in any other case may and highlight the fleeting assembly level of a winter and a spring fruit within the course of.
The moisture in fruits and different whole-food sweeteners lends nicely to liquidy desserts. “Custard-textured issues … are most likely probably the most straightforward to adapt,” stated Levy. The first fruit-sweetened recipe he developed was a sunshine-yellow custard with ripe mangoes and pureed golden raisins. Samantha Kincaid, the previous pastry chef and co-owner of the now-closed Cadence Restaurant in Philadelphia, favored to use caramelized sunchokes as a base for custards. Pastry chef Joanne Chang sweetened an almond-milk panna cotta in her cookbook Baking With Much less Sugar with dates.
Levy discovered that even some fluffier treats like scones, muffins and muffins may very well be made totally with whole-food sweeteners too, although the additional fiber and different parts typically required extra reinvention. He selected freeze-dried pineapple and date powder (AKA date sugar) to sweeten a piña colada-esque pound cake. However he knew the fiber may intervene with the cake’s rising. “Preserving the fiber from absorbing all of the water was one thing I needed to conquer,” he stated. He combined the powders with butter to coat them in fats, which principally lower the fiber off from the batter and let the cake rise unimpeded.
Muffins on the gooier finish of the spectrum have been simpler. Levy’s sticky toffee pudding cake – which was among the best issues I’ve ever tasted once I made it at residence – will get most of it sweetness from dates, as in conventional variations of the recipe. Nonfat milk powder rounds it out together with miso, which replicates caramel’s advanced umami-sweetness.
Even so, there are limits to what Levy may reinvent with whole-food sweeteners. “I can’t make an angel meals cake this manner,” he stated, or meringue. Nor may he make American-style chocolate chip cookies, which unfold within the oven because the sugar within the dough melts and get crispy-edged because it caramelizes.
To him, these limits weren’t a failure, however a revelation. He needed Good & Candy to indicate by omission “that there are issues that sugar is helpful for”.
Certainly one of sugar’s most hanging superpowers is one which bakers have been leveraging for ages: preservation. Préalpato defined that the shelf lifetime of candied fruits, as an example, will get shorter because the syrup it’s cooked in will get much less sugary. It’s the identical with jam.
After which there’s granulated sugar’s distinctive impartial sweetness, plain sufficient to be a clean canvas in opposition to which delicate flavors can shine. “That’s why I don’t have a vanilla ice-cream within the e book, as a result of to get that pure vanilla taste it’s a must to use sugar,” Levy stated.
There’s additionally – lest we overlook – the bittersweet magic of caramel, which is case sufficient for sugar alone. A crème brûlée is however a shallow pond of custard with out its mirrored mahogany floor. A croquembouche isn’t wedding-worthy with out its cooked-sugar tinsel garland. And a southern caramel cake is neither fascinating nor a tremendous race if it lacks the caramelized frosting poured hurriedly over the layers earlier than it hardens.
Lots of my favourite desserts do want sugar to shine, simply as some want carbon-intensive dairy and eggs. I gained’t assume twice about utilizing them after they’re essential. However extra desserts than I’d have anticipated are simply as tasty when sweetened with fruit. Dates will probably be a staple in my pantry now, in case I get the urge for a panna cotta or peach pop tarts, which style like a caramel-y cobbler during which dates deliciously exchange sugar.
Considering past cupfuls of sugar is as a lot a taste play as it’s a option to nudge dessert gently within the path of well being. Levy factors to an thought in Samin Nosrat’s cookbook Salt, Fats, Acid, Warmth. “Acid doesn’t simply come from pink wine vinegar. Warmth doesn’t come simply from black pepper,” he stated. “That’s how I feel we must always take into consideration sweetness. It doesn’t simply come from cane sugar.”
Espresso bean panna cotta
These little panna cottas, like decadently candy and creamy lattes, are really easy to make and such a delight to eat, making them the right make-ahead dessert for a cocktail party. What makes it candy? Dates and coconut. This gluten- and dairy-free recipe requires no baking however does require a meals processor.
Serves: 4
Lively time: 20 minutes
Complete time: Two hours 20 minutes
Elements
1½ cups (330g) canned coconut cream (not coconut milk), combined nicely
1 tsp gelatin powder (see notice)
⅓ cup dates, pitted and chopped
1 tbsp espresso beans, finely floor
¼ tsp vanilla extract
Put two tablespoons of the coconut cream in a small bowl and sprinkle the gelatin over it. Put aside so the gelatin can “bloom” when you transfer on to the subsequent steps.
In a meals processor, mix the dates and remaining coconut cream and puree. Switch the puree to a small saucepan and set over medium warmth. On the first signal of simmering (effervescent on the floor), take away it from the warmth. Instantly add the gelatin combination, the bottom espresso and vanilla and whisk gently. Let the combination steep for 5 minutes, then pressure it by means of a fine-mesh sieve right into a spouted cup, urgent with a rubber spatula to squeeze all of the liquid out.
Distribute the panna cotta evenly amongst 4 espresso cups or four-ounce ramekins. Loosely cowl and refrigerate for at the least two hours to set. As soon as set, you possibly can cowl the panna cottas tightly and preserve them within the fridge for as much as two days.
Be aware:
To make this recipe vegan, exchange the gelatin with ½ teaspoon powdered agar-agar or 1 tablespoon agar flakes and instantly puree the agar-agar with the dates and coconut cream.
Reprinted with permission from Good & Candy by Brian Levy, copyright © 2022.