Baking with Less Sugar Read Online Free PDF Page A

or cookies into a cold or even warmish oven and allow the ovento heat up while the pastry is inside, the batter or dough will melt before it cooks, and the precious air bubbles you’ve worked hard to incorporate will peter out. Leaden and dense pastries are the awful result! I’ve listed “preheat your oven to XXX°F [YYY°C]” at the beginning of the recipes for a reason. Do it before you start and then only put items into your oven once it has fully come to temperature. When you hear that pastry takes patience, this is what they mean. Wait those 10 minutes! Your pastries will thank you.
    5. How to grate ginger. Grating fresh ginger can be a frustrating task—it gets stringy and you feel like you’re grating more of your knuckles than the ginger—until you learn this nifty trick: Place the ginger in the freezer and when it is completely frozen, use the rounded part of a spoon to easily scrape off the peel. Grate to your heart’s content. You’ll have a heap of grated ginger in no time.

HOW TO SUBSTITUTE FOR SUGAR
    To work around not using refined white sugar, I loved exploring baking with these ingredients. Not all of these made their way into the recipes here, but I offer them up as well as possibilities for you to play with in your baking. I made a conscious decision not to include artificial sweeteners. I’ve never liked the various aftertastes that each one brings, and I wanted to develop recipes that I’d feel comfortable serving anyone looking to reduce refined white sugar consumption.
    1. Maple syrup. Maple is the boiled sap from the maple tree. It has a buttery, warm flavor (maybe it just seems buttery and warm to me because I associate it with a big pile of pancakes), and it adds a distinctive flavor to all of the desserts it is used in. We use grade B maple syrup, which means that it comes from tapping maple trees of their sap late in the winter when it is a bit warmer and the sap is more concentrated. It’s darker in color than grade A, rich, and caramel-y, and offers the most flavor bang for the buck in baking. Once opened, maple syrup should be stored in the refrigerator where it will last about 6 months. If you see mold on the surface of the syrup, discard the whole jar as it may be contaminated. The standard substitution if you want to substitute maple syrup for sugar is 1 cup syrup for 1 cup sugar and then decrease the liquid in the recipe by 3 tablespoons per 1 cup substitution. This results in a dessert of equal sweetness to the original, but I’ve learned that you can typically halve the amount of sweetness in many pastries and they will taste just as good if not better.
    2. Honey. Depending on where it is harvested and from what flower, honey comes in all different flavors and kinds. As with many ingredients I use in baking, I tend to choose what tastes good to me in its raw state to determine what I use in my baked goods; with so many locally produced honeys these days, I suggest you pick one that you love eating straight from the jar for your baking. Honey can be stored at room temperature when open. It’s a bit higher in calories than sugar and also sweeter, so you can use less in your baking and still satisfy your sweet tooth.
    3. Molasses. This thick, dark treacle syrup is the by-product of refining sugarcane or beets for sugar. I stock a mild unsulphured molasses in my pantry that adds a spicy warm note to my baking. It is acidic, which means that it reacts with baking soda; cakes made with molasses will always have baking soda in them to release the bubbles and lighten the batter. Blackstrap molasses is extremely thick, strong, and bittersweet. It is the by-product of the final stages of refining sugar and it has the most minerals and health benefits of all the types of molasses but is also the most pungent. For our purposes, we use a mild molasses that is not blackstrap since its flavor is gentler. These molasses, such as Grandma’s