October 2007
Sweeteners
How the brands measure up
Most nonsugar sweeteners will taste fine in your tea or lemonade. But use some of them for baking a cake, and you could have
a real flop.
These are the findings of our tests of 13 lower-calorie and no-calorie sweeteners, which we added to drinks and used to bake cookies and cakes, following package directions. We found that no sweetener does it all and that no-calorie products didn’t bake as well as lower-calorie sweeteners: In other words, you can’t really have your cake and no sugar too.
By far the best “fooler” in the lemonade and baked goods was a brand of fructose, which is the type of sugar found in fruit and honey. When used as directed in recipes for batter cakes, it gave better results than the other sweeteners. But it provided almost as many calories in the recipe as the real thing, and it costs almost five times as much.
In lemonade, most did well, but differences were noticeable. For example, the packets of an aspartame sweetener left no artificial taste, while a sucralose sweetener had an artificial-sweetener flavor and was a little bitter.
Questions linger about possible health effects of two of the oldest sweeteners, saccharin and aspartame (see Aspartame & Saccharin). The newest sweetener, the herbal product stevia, is labeled a dietary supplement, so it didn’t require approval by the Food and Drug Administration. Among our findings:
Cost ranged widely. The price of the equivalent of 2 teaspoons of sugar ranged from 2 cents for Wal-Mart’s Great Value Altern to 66 cents for Sweet Simplicity. Two teaspoons of sugar cost a penny.
Some instructions were vague. The Web site for a fructose sweetener said to “use it just like sugar to sweeten hot and cold drinks” and indicated that you can bake with it, though it’s sold only in packets, not in bulk. But it didn’t include any usage-amounts information. (For that reason, we listed its results only for lemonade.)
Lower-calorie, but not the same. Compared with a piece of the cake we baked with sugar, which had 77 calories, a piece of cake baked with fructose had 72, and with a sugar blend, 51. A piece of our sucralose and sugar blend cake had 38 calories.
Two stand-ins were too many. In a separate test, when we replaced the brown sugar in the recipe for Nestlé Toll House chocolate chip cookies with a sucralose and brown sugar blend, we got a decent soft-baked cookie. But when we replaced both the brown and the white sugars with their sucralose equivalents, the cookies came out dry, with a prominent, lingering artificial flavor.
Baking turns up the heat. Our baking tests turned up major variations in color, texture, taste, and even size of the finished product. Two sugar stand-in blends for baking showed promise, turning out tender, sweet, golden-brown cakes and cookies that could pass as decent substitutes for the real thing. (Both of those products include some real sugar.)
But the cake we made with an aspartame sweetener emerged from the oven looking and tasting like a biscuit--flat, dense, and with no hint of sweetness. The aspartame sweetener cookies came out tender but equally unsweet. The container says in large print, “Measures like sugar.” Smaller print near the bottom of the container suggests that the aspartame sweetener can be used for baking but cautions that it, “may become less sweet in some prolonged heating applications.”
No such disasters occurred with the lemonade and tea. But our testers could detect at least some artificial-sweetener flavor in most cases.
These are the findings of our tests of 13 lower-calorie and no-calorie sweeteners, which we added to drinks and used to bake cookies and cakes, following package directions. We found that no sweetener does it all and that no-calorie products didn’t bake as well as lower-calorie sweeteners: In other words, you can’t really have your cake and no sugar too.
By far the best “fooler” in the lemonade and baked goods was a brand of fructose, which is the type of sugar found in fruit and honey. When used as directed in recipes for batter cakes, it gave better results than the other sweeteners. But it provided almost as many calories in the recipe as the real thing, and it costs almost five times as much.
In lemonade, most did well, but differences were noticeable. For example, the packets of an aspartame sweetener left no artificial taste, while a sucralose sweetener had an artificial-sweetener flavor and was a little bitter.
Questions linger about possible health effects of two of the oldest sweeteners, saccharin and aspartame (see Aspartame & Saccharin). The newest sweetener, the herbal product stevia, is labeled a dietary supplement, so it didn’t require approval by the Food and Drug Administration. Among our findings:
Cost ranged widely. The price of the equivalent of 2 teaspoons of sugar ranged from 2 cents for Wal-Mart’s Great Value Altern to 66 cents for Sweet Simplicity. Two teaspoons of sugar cost a penny.
Some instructions were vague. The Web site for a fructose sweetener said to “use it just like sugar to sweeten hot and cold drinks” and indicated that you can bake with it, though it’s sold only in packets, not in bulk. But it didn’t include any usage-amounts information. (For that reason, we listed its results only for lemonade.)
Lower-calorie, but not the same. Compared with a piece of the cake we baked with sugar, which had 77 calories, a piece of cake baked with fructose had 72, and with a sugar blend, 51. A piece of our sucralose and sugar blend cake had 38 calories.
Two stand-ins were too many. In a separate test, when we replaced the brown sugar in the recipe for Nestlé Toll House chocolate chip cookies with a sucralose and brown sugar blend, we got a decent soft-baked cookie. But when we replaced both the brown and the white sugars with their sucralose equivalents, the cookies came out dry, with a prominent, lingering artificial flavor.
Baking turns up the heat. Our baking tests turned up major variations in color, texture, taste, and even size of the finished product. Two sugar stand-in blends for baking showed promise, turning out tender, sweet, golden-brown cakes and cookies that could pass as decent substitutes for the real thing. (Both of those products include some real sugar.)
But the cake we made with an aspartame sweetener emerged from the oven looking and tasting like a biscuit--flat, dense, and with no hint of sweetness. The aspartame sweetener cookies came out tender but equally unsweet. The container says in large print, “Measures like sugar.” Smaller print near the bottom of the container suggests that the aspartame sweetener can be used for baking but cautions that it, “may become less sweet in some prolonged heating applications.”
No such disasters occurred with the lemonade and tea. But our testers could detect at least some artificial-sweetener flavor in most cases.
