Lean and lovin' it: A new sugar substitute in time for holiday baking
Swerve, a sugar replacement product, swerved right under my natural sugar substitute radar until a $1.00-off coupon appeared in an email advertisement. Swerve needed that coupon to get me to buy it because a 1-pound bag costs around $10; nearly 20 times the cost of granulated sugar.
Is it worth it? Here's my story.
First I went to Swerve's website and found a lot of strong promises like: "Made from a unique combination of ingredients derived from fruits and vegetables," and that it "contains no artificial ingredients, preservatives or flavors … is non-glycemic and safe for those living with diabetes."
Using my coupon, I bought a one-pound bag of Swerve and brought it home for testing.
Swerve's package states that it's a combination of erythritol (ear-rith-ri-tall) and oligosaccharide (olly-go-sack-a-ride). Since neither ingredient sounded natural to me, even though the package's front stated it was "Natural," I did some research.
Erythritol is a low calorie (0.24 calories per gram versus sugar's 4) sugar alcohol. No, erythritol won't make you drunk or even slightly giddy; it's not that kind of alcohol. Erythritol's made by fermenting glucose (one half of what we know as table sugar) with a special type of yeast.
Other sugar alcohols about which you may have heard, like malitol and sorbitol have digestive issues when over-consumed. If you've ever eaten a six-ounce bag of sugar-free, sorbitol-sweetened candy, as I ashamedly admit I did 20 years ago, you know what that can mean. It appears that erythritol does not have that issue.
Googling oligosaccharides got me a very technical answer. The kind of complex, polysyllabic description I ran into just made my head hurt.
My simplest definition: oligosaccharides taste sweet, and since it is considered a prebiotic, it plays well with probiotics (think yogurt).
After selecting a tantalizing brownie recipe plucked from Cook's Country website made with two of my favorite ingredients, tart cherries and chocolate, I stepped into my kitchen to make them.
Cook's Country's brownie recipe called for 2¼ cups granulated sugar; perfect for reduction. I used one cup of Swerve and cut 775 calories and 200 grams of sugar from Cook's recipe. I wanted to cut the fat (both butter and oil) in half, too, but didn't want to change two significant recipe components simultaneously in case the end results weren't what I'd hoped and I wouldn't know what caused a problem. However, instead of vegetable oil I used a healthy, good-quality olive oil.
Because I want to make desserts as healthy as possible I used organic eggs, flour, butter, vanilla and unsweetened chocolate along with organic sugar.
I didn't use a microwave oven, as Cook's Country suggested to melt the unsweetened chocolate and sweet butter or to rehydrate the tart cherries with almond extract and water since both were easily accomplished on my stove top.
Stirring everything together was easy, once measured-out, melted or rehydrated. Surprisingly, my brownies baked-off in just 25 minutes; quick for a well-filled 13-by-9-inch pan.
My new brownies also required 2 hours of cooling before cutting; worth the wait though. My brownies came out richly flavored, with nary a hint that almost half the sugar had vanished. My brownies reminded me of a Black Forest cake without the frosting.
I changed one thing after that test, I didn't believe my brownies were quite as sweet as they should be and so I went with 1¼ cups Swerve.
Want to make my new brownies? Here's the recipe. They'll arrive not too late for the holidays.
• Find Swerve at Whole Foods Markets and Heinen's Fine Foods. Don Mauer welcomes questions, comments and recipe makeover requests. Write to him at don@ theleanwizard.com.