Baking with less fat and sugar

August 23, 2021 3:50 PM

Looking for principles on recipe modification to reduce fat and sugar in sweet baked goods!

I am mostly interested in modifying recipes for sweet baked goods that are using chemical leaveners and not yeast. Help me understand what will will happen to things like cookies, cakes, scones, etc if I just start reducing the amount of butter and sugar. Are there magic ratios beyond which dramatic changes in texture (moistness, structure, etc) happen? What are good substitition ingredients to mitigate these changes, vs. just using "less"?

(I am a reasonably experienced cook and comfortable improvising in most kinds of cooking outside of baking, where I have usually been a strict recipe-follower)

posted by kanuck to Food & Drink (16 answers total)

I bake things, but I am not a precision baker. The following have all worked just fine for me:

Replace 1 large egg with 1/4 cup applesauce. Works great! Other substitutes include ground flax seeds plus water, and the water left over from making chickpeas (aquafaba).

You can replace oil with nut butters or seed butters, works fine.

You can replace sugar with minced fruit (but note that you may need of less other liquid ingredients).
posted by aniola at 4:05 PM on August 23, 2021 [3 favorites]

King Arthur Flour has written about reducing sugar here and here. And reducing fat here.
posted by Pretty Good Talker at 4:22 PM on August 23, 2021 [5 favorites]

I’ve taken to replacing half the oil in sweet breads with applesauce. It works really well!
posted by spitbull at 4:29 PM on August 23, 2021 [1 favorite]

You can also replace butter with nut/seed butters.
posted by aniola at 4:32 PM on August 23, 2021

It might also interest you to know that you can replace flour with beans.
posted by aniola at 4:33 PM on August 23, 2021

Know that replacing fat with applesauce changes the texture significantly (mainly reducing crispness). This might work okay for a cake but not for a cookie. You also might not notice it so much on the first day, but it may really impact the second day. It's hard to describe how much is too much, because everyone has different preferences, and they aren't necessarily consistent across all things (the texture I'm willing to accept from a chocolate-chip goodie may be different from what I accept from a cinnamon-raisin goodie). In the end, you'll have to learn by experimenting.

What's worked best for me is keeping treats the way I like them, but replacing many of my instances of treats with fruit, which I also love.
posted by rikschell at 4:52 PM on August 23, 2021 [1 favorite]

If you haven't looked at all at sugar substitutes recently, you might not be aware that there's a whole new world of them out there. Many do a decent job of mimicking the kind of sugar they're replacing. I'm not sure of your goal in reducing sugar, and certainly the substitutes have their own issues, but you can pretty easily swap out half the sugar with a substitute that you can find pretty easily in the grocery aisle.
posted by bluedaisy at 4:56 PM on August 23, 2021 [1 favorite]

In the More with Less cookbook, one woman reported just cutting all sugar by a third with no bad effects. I haven’t tried this myself though.

Switching oil for applesauce does change the texture. If you want to try recipes made to work with low sugar and no oil (and don’t mind vegan), I’d recommend the sites Forks Over Knives, Shane and Simple, and Happy Herbivore. That might give you some sense of how this can work and make it easier to adjust your own recipes.
posted by FencingGal at 5:08 PM on August 23, 2021

Here are 25 low-sugar baking recipes from Stella Parks.

And Baking with Less Sugar has been a reliable resource for me for many years of baking for diabetic friends and reducing my own sugar intake.
posted by rhiannonstone at 6:54 PM on August 23, 2021 [3 favorites]

When I was looking for gallbladder-friendly no-fat baking recipes, I found this awesome one for a tea loaf. It's really good (and simple) and you could probably cut the sugar down to taste too. It has no fat, and instead the moisture is provided by black tea, used to soak raisins or other dried fruit. It's simple enough that you can experiment with trying different spices, or different fruits. I was less worried about sugar so would eat it with a dollop of jam or fruit compote. I also recommend heating it up :-)

Quite a few British 'tea loaf' or 'fruit loaf' recipes, which are basically something between bread and cake, can be made with no fat and dried fruit instead of sugar. So you could try searching for some of those recipes. The UK 'all recipes' site I linked to above has lots of versions.

And as an fyi for anyone else: ideally you would be eating a slice of this kind of loaf with a thick slab of butter on top, and a cup of tea on the side :-)
posted by EllaEm at 7:28 PM on August 23, 2021

Quick breads, snack cakes, and muffins - the family of things that range from beer bread to pound cake to chocolate yogurt cake to morning glory muffins - tend to be a lot more resilient to tinkering than cookies, scones, and layer cakes. I’m not a baking scientist (if you want to become one, I’d recommend the book Bakewise), but I believe it’s because the batter has more liquid than cookies/scones so you can substitute less fatty things and have it still come out moist (yogurt/applesauce for oil and butter, shredded zucchini/carrot or mashed bananas for a bit less of it) and the crumbs are typically bigger than layer cakes. Many recipes also call for sugar syrups and glazes that you can just leave off.

Quick breads also freeze well post-baking (cookies & scones do better pre-baking) if you want to reduce your sugar intake in a more roundabout way.

If you bake with raisins, soak them in hot water for 10 min before adding them to the batter and they’ll stay extra plump and impart a bit more sweetness to your baking.
posted by A Blue Moon at 8:01 PM on August 23, 2021

Yeah, in most American recipes you can just cut the sugar by 30-50% without ill effects.

If you want to be "healthy", replacing some of the overprocessed white flour with something closer to wholemeal or a more exotic flour will have more impact on how full a treat leaves you and its glycemic index than tinkering with the fat content. In my experience you can go up to 30% replacement in heavier cakes before you need to start tinkering with the rest of the recipe, usually by increasing the leavening - just be sure to check it's wholemeal cake flour, not the far more heavy wholemeal bread flour. Spelt flour's lovely and works in any moist baked treat, with a taste very close to wholemeal wheat. Gluten-free flours like buckwheat or almond have a more forward taste, but in the right combo they're delicious.
posted by I claim sanctuary at 3:16 AM on August 24, 2021 [1 favorite]

I agree with the advice about applesauce. I'd only add that the rule of thumb I've heard is to replace 1/2 fat with applesauce. I think it makes more sense to replace the fat than to replace egg with has great nutritional value.

We like this recipe for Spanish Bar Cake. Mrs. SS and I both remember the A&P original from your childhoods. We use store-bought cream cheese frosting.

A slight variant on the applesauce thing is to use fresh apple instead of applesauce as in the recipe below. This cake is good as a breakfast treat or as dessert (maybe with ice cream or whipped cream).

Preheat oven to 350(.
Grease and flour 8” x 8” pan.


Peel and dice:

2 cups apples

Mix:

1 egg
¼ cup vegetable oil
¼ cup unsweetened applesauce
1 cup white sugar
¼ tsp salt
½ tsp vanilla

Combine:

1 cup all-purpose flour
1 tsp cinnamon
½ tsp baking soda

Mix dry ingredients with wet. Fold in apples. Spread batter in pan.
Bake at 350( for 30-35 minutes. Allow 10 minutes to cool.

Adapted from a recipe submitted by Judy Richardson to AllRecipies.com
posted by SemiSalt at 7:19 AM on August 24, 2021

America's Test Kitchen has an entire cookbook with recipes for baked goods with 30-50% less sugar: Naturally Sweet

They have some nice information about different sweeteners too.
posted by skunk pig at 8:55 AM on August 24, 2021

In the More with Less cookbook, one woman reported just cutting all sugar by a third with no bad effects. I haven’t tried this myself though.
Generally find that equivalent US vs UK just have a ton more sugar in them, so for a gentle reduction you may just get some mileage out of british baking sites.
posted by ominous_paws at 12:50 AM on August 25, 2021

I have discovered that applesauce actually greatly *improves* the texture of zucchini and banana breads, what I’ve made using it. The bread is moister and stays that way. That’s why I said “for sweet breads,” not “for cookies.” I agree you wouldn’t want to use it in anything that is supposed to go crunch, but you want the opposite in a sweet bread. In my house, it’s a huge hit. You cannot tell there’s less fat, just that the bread has a lovely soft crumb that lasts. It doesn’t dry out as fast. And it holds together better.

And yes just cut the sugar in half in most recipes.
posted by spitbull at 2:48 AM on August 25, 2021 [1 favorite]