How to Bake with Less Sugar

That’s an easy one, right? Just use less sugar in your recipe…next topic please. Wait, not so fast. Anyone who has ever baked before knows it’s not that simple. Sugar, of course, provides the flavor that makes sweets taste, well, sweet.

What most non-bakers (like me) do not know is that sugar also provides much needed texture and structure to baked goods when it bonds with water. Without enough sugar, your cakes will come out, not only unsweet, but tough, dry and chewy as well. Sugar also leavens or helps your holiday treats rise as it creates millions of tiny air bubbles that expand during baking.

Too little sugar and you’ll end up with flat cakes and breads. Next, sugar provides your baked goods with a rich, golden-brown color as it caramelizes, which also adds a crispy, sweet crust to muffin tops and pie crusts. Sugar is also a flavor enhancer, like salt, which brings out the flavors of the other ingredients. Finally, in chocolate treats, sugar hides the bitter taste of the cocoa. So, if you desire to cut sugar from your holiday recipes, it must be done in amounts that do not render your treats inedible. Here’s how.

A recipe for 36 sugar cookies I located online calls for 1 cup (200g) of sugar. How much of that sugar can you remove without turning the cookies into bland, crumbly, dry balls of dough? Believe it or not, quite a few people have researched this question and the answer involves a great deal of experimentation that entails gradually decreasing the amount of sugar by small increments and sampling the results. (There is a tool out there called the baker’s percentage that can assist with this process, but it involves a lot of yucky math, so I steered clear. Read more about it here if you’re into evil math). To make things a bit more complicated, different amounts of sugar can be removed from different baked goods, such as cookies, cakes, pies, and muffins.

Before we discuss just how much sugar to remove from your recipes, there are a few “tricks” you can use to offset the reduced sweetness. Fruit can be used to add natural sweetness, such as adding raisins to oatmeal cookies or berries to muffins. You can also add superficial sugar to the surface of your treats to disguise the fact that there’s less sugar within. Finally, chilling your cookie dough for at least 30 minutes to a few days will increase caramelization and improve their spread which adds to their crispiness.

Now, back to that tricky question…How much sugar can one eliminate from a recipe without overly compromising taste and texture? Well, that depends upon what you’re baking. It even depends on variations within categories (sugar, chocolate, butter cookies; sponge, blended, foam and creamed cakes for example). Get the idea?

After reading various articles on this subject, generally speaking, if you reduce the sugar called for in the original recipe by no more than 25%, you should be safe, regardless of what you’re baking. (Hint: converting the amount of sugar from cups or teaspoons to grams helps immensely when doing the math). Some articles claim that percentage can be as high as 50%, as in blended cakes for example and blueberry muffins or just about any baked good that incorporates fruit.

Sure, your sugar cookies might not be as sweet, your banana nut bread and muffins might not rise as high, and your brownies might be a little crumbly, but remember, there are 773 calories in one cup of sugar. Reduce that by 25% and you’ve just cut about 200 calories from the recipe. Chew on that for a while.