does this need “added sugar”?
A very good argument can be made for training our palate and particularly for weening ourselves off the superfluous use of added ingredients in our cooking and baking. This can be for many a reason, not the least of which is to allow the flavor of central ingredients to shine through. While this tenet may apply in many regards, today’s discussion is about superfluous use of sugar.
I consider myself to be a person who spends a fair amount of time studying recipes. As I travel around, through books, tv shows, newspapers, the internet, and at various and sundry outposts, both domestic and abroad, where I revel in and ogle other people’s creative food expressions, I make it a point to study, among their many perspectives, their sensibility in the use of sugar and other sweeteners. Believe me, being something of a pastry kitchen “rat” in the sense that my daughter might be called something akin to a “gym rat”, or others are referred to “mall rats”, I feel I am soundly grounded in the wonderful applications of and enhancing performance aspects of sugar. But not the gratuitous uses….. I get the sweetener thing. I get the crunch thing. I get the physical benefits of sugar as we all learned in Pastry School.
The question here, always becomes, for me anyway, when is sugar well-used and when is it superfluous? I try to draw a line in being somewhat of an advocate for the actual, literal taste of the food that one is eating and not adding sugar for sugar’s sake……. In other words, when I taste something and it tastes like sugar and not what it is, it’s been way overdone – like my son’s favorite birthday cakes from famous New York Bakeries. Do you want a vanilla cake to have that ethereal light and lofty essence of vanilla or just taste cloyingly like sugar? Do you want a pistachio cake to taste like those delicately-scented rare and beautiful pistachios or like sugar? You get the point. And yet, I see chefs, even great ones do this all the time. And, of course, this is all over and above the obviously more important issue of a society which is suffering greatly from our overindulgences in sugar in general.
Hmmm, is this a matter of palate, habit, what we have grown accustomed to, how food producers get us hooked, or just plain overindulgence? Or something else? We all know how food manufacturers have snuck great amounts of sugars into our prepared foods – and I watch for this all of the time. Beyond this, we examine our own hand. I ask, do we need sugar on top of our oatmeal? Do we need sugar on our grapefruit halves? In our salad dressings? In fruit-based yogurts? In our cole slaw? Do we need sugar in vegetable sauces? Vegetable dishes? I actually love the use of a carrot in tomato sauce to sweeten and offset its inherent acidic nature. We can do more like this to balance out without the sugar, I think.
I do spend a good amount of time studying my cookbook collection, which by the way, in spite of my determined efforts to keep it from doing so, keeps growing in piles around the house……. As I do this, each and every time that I come upon a recipe where sugar seems to be added somewhere where it feels like it’s not needed (to me) and is there for a reason I can’t quite understand, I find myself tuning out – but not before trying to consider, quite seriously, why.
And so, I come upon my very own mental guideline about added sugar – taste your raw ingredients first; add only when necessary; add only the amount to where you just get to the point of diminishing returns – that is where your food begins to taste more like sugar and less like the food it is. If possible, err on the scant side. I feel similarly about salt by the way.
As I was reading along this morning, I came upon a recipe for a Red Snapper served over a Squash Purée…… and the purée had a full 1/4 cup of brown sugar…….. Hmmm, I said to myself, why? Of course, I might understand the inclination to add enhancing flavors to some vegetables which may be otherwise considered to be a tad one-dimensional or even bland, and other dishes which seem to call for them, and I do get this. But, as I have always felt, in recipes such as the ubiquitous Sweet Potato Casseroles which adorn the Thanksgiving tables, why do you need sugar and those dastardly marshmallows? (Don’t get me wrong, I love marshmallows, just not in Sweet Potatoes). Sweet Potatoes are plenty sweet and taste great with just a tiny sprinkling of salt and some good Extra Virgin Olive Oil, maybe a sprinkling of herbs – but gosh, they don’t need any sugar!
Over the years and since the 1950s when recipes really morphed into something other than combinations of natural foods, we seemed to get addicted to adding sugar to just about everything. I, for example, never added sugar to my iced tea, nor did I pour it over fruit salad – which by the way , needs no enhancement in my mind – but if you must, add a bunch of mint leaves, or Lemon Verbena and a sprinkling of lemon juice. Yesterday, as I saw a famous Chef add copious amounts of sugar to a dish of marsala-soaked oranges, it sent me into a huge “whoa” in my enjoyment of the show.
Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal had a recipe for Tuscan Watermelon Salad which was doused in Sambuca…….. Really? Does Watermelon need sweetening? That one really got me because the Tuscans are such sticklers for fresh and unencumbered dishes…….. Sambuca to me in not much more than a licorice-flavored alcoholic simple syrup, right? The recipe called for 3/4 cups of Sambuca for 9 cups of Watermelon plus another 1/4 cup of sugar…. Yikes —– stop! I guess I should try it before I dismiss it. I am actually a huge fan of Sambuca on a cold winter night in a nice little cordial glass….. but this was too much for me.
Even when chefs call for macerating fruit with sugar to draw out the juices, ok, I get that this is a physical change needed in the texturizing of the fruit. But go slow, use just enough to get the juices flowing. Better yet, is there another way to coax these juices out? Like warming them gently in a pan with a little bit of water and a sprinkle of lemon juice? I am reminded of Chef John Besh’s brilliant blueberry sorbet recipe – no sugar added!
Well, anyway, you get the point here – let the food taste like the food that it is. Learn to enjoy it’s inherent flavor. Enhance only when necessary and with an eye toward using other flavor-enhancers before you reach for the sugar – like herbs, butter, cream, nuts, wines, garlic, onions, vinegars, extracts, and perhaps my all time favorite – fresh Gingerroot!
Of course there is an exception to every rule. My weakness in adhering to this rule is for honey, of course. That same chef which poured sugar over the oranges yesterday also gave a light drizzle of honey over the most lovely dish of fresh pears and a gorgeous gorgonzola. That, I have to confess, I’d go weak at the knees for. I still can find myself dreaming of that heather honey from Wales I bought at Fortnum and Mason in London a few years ago which sent me into a swoon and lingered on my tongue for hours afterward.
We all have our weaknesses…………
So, Go-Lightly, as in Holly, if at all!