Reducing White Sugar in Baking

Sugar is an essential part of many baked goods, but it isn’t really good for us. I have long ago decided that I would rather have fewer, but better, sweets than to have the same number of mediocre treats.

When I cook a meal on a stove, I have a lot of control over what goes in and, provided I know what I am doing, can make significant changes to a basic recipe and get stellar results. Baking, though, is a special challenge.

There is a lot of chemistry at work when you bake, and ingredients can do more than one thing for you. I remember when I tried to substitute out eggs without knowing what role they were filling in my bread and got an inedible mass of No Thank You.

Table Sugar: Equal Parts Fructose and Glucose

Sugar is a talented player and can cover a lot of roles.

She (Let’s anthropomorphize sugar into a She, shall we?) helps with rising, texture, moisture, and browning as well as sweetness.  This is one reason simply subbing in a sugar substitute may not work well – they have different chemical structures and will behave slightly differently. Sugar substitutes are an ongoing project here, but this post is about reducing cane sugar alone.

Fear not! There is a great deal of unneeded sugar in many foods, even in cookies. There are plenty of times where, after removing a certain amount of sugar in baked goods, the revised product was better than the original. Please, do not assume that removing sugar means losing yumminess!

Reducing sugar has been a top priority to us at the Boulangerie.  If you start making changes in baking and you don’t know what you are doing, you get a big mess.  So, how do you reduce sugar in muffins and, by extension, in quick breads, and still have a tasty treat? 

You can generally reduce sugar to up to 50% of the volume of the flour and still have a solid treat, but going lower will decidedly mar your beautiful final product you are going for. Below, I have included a very interesting article compiled after a series of tests done by the King Arthur test kitchen and below that the takeaway list if you are in a hurry.

How to reduce sugar in muffins: key takeaways from King Arthur Flour

• Reducing sugar in muffins affects not just their sweetness, but their texture and volume.
• Reducing sugar to 50 percent in muffins that begin with a higher amount of sugar (over 50 percent) will yield muffins with sufficient sweetness; moist, tender texture, and balanced, interesting flavor.
• Reducing sugar in muffins whose recipe calls for a lower amount of sugar to begin with (50 percent or lower) will yield muffins with bland flavor and increasingly poor (dry, tough) texture.
• Topping lower-sugar muffins with a sprinkle of sugar adds a nice hit of sweetness in each bite while only raising the sugar level of the muffins slightly.

I cannot recommend this series enough. They have also looked at cookies, cakes, breads, and bars. I will be making a post for each one, along with a link to the original post. If you cannot wait for my review, you can find it all on their blog.