Lower sugar (not zero sugar) baking recipes

September 29, 2021 6:04 PM

I'm trying to mildly reduce my family's sugar intake, but not by swapping in "natural" sugars. What are some good books or websites for sensible, slightly less sweet baking recipes these days?

I'm looking for recipes from scratch that have say, half the usual amount of sugar in a cake recipe, or use part sugar and a little stevia or whatnot. Slightly less sweet altogether. I'm not looking for Extremely Healthy recipes where a cake or cookies have no sweetener at all (yuck) or those recipes where white sugar was exchanged for an equivalent amount of sugar in the form of pureed dates or apple syrup. I often just use 2/3 of the base amount of sugar in recipes, and that seems to go fine, but more ideas would be helpful.

posted by slightlybewildered to Food & Drink (13 answers total)

Someone told me once that you can just put half of the sugar that’s called for into most cookie recipes and they’ll still taste fine. I have often found it to be true.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 6:28 PM on September 29, 2021 [9 favorites]

I have also found that you can just cut the sugar by a third or by half and the recipe is fine. Unless the sugar is structural (like in tuiles) then I'd say give it a try.

The More-With-Less Cookbook has a lot of really good recipes for traditional baking that use less sugar than standard.
posted by blnkfrnk at 6:33 PM on September 29, 2021 [2 favorites]

I own this older Pillsbury Healthy Baking book, and I think it fits your requirements well. I’ve been happy with the recipes I’ve tried.
posted by FencingGal at 6:39 PM on September 29, 2021

A lot of British biscuit, teacake, and pie recipes are considerably less sweet than those in the USA--so perhaps British baking cookbooks?
posted by Anonymous at 6:45 PM on September 29, 2021

Yes, just start scanting the sugar in recipes. Start with a quarter or half cup less than called for and experiment with even less over time. Usually works fine -- you don't even notice it.
posted by shadygrove at 7:27 PM on September 29, 2021

The America's Test Kitchen/Cook's Illustrated website has lots of reduced sugar recipes. You do have to subscribe to see them, I think it's less than $40 per year, though.
posted by Lycaste at 8:29 PM on September 29, 2021

From across the pond, I generally find American recipes have twice the amount of sugar I would expect. Nthing the advice above about halving the sugar. But also suggesting venturing out to use recipes from the UK which generally have less sugar anyway.
posted by BAKERSFIELD! at 10:47 PM on September 29, 2021 [2 favorites]

Pumpkin (or squash) pie has no structural need for sugar, you can adjust as you like. Squash-egg custard is a vegetable dish.
posted by away for regrooving at 12:20 AM on September 30, 2021

We regularly bake from Australian recipes using half the sugar that they recommend and the results are still delicious. Seriously, most of what makes sweet baking taste good isn't the sweetness per se, it's all the other flavours and textures that go along with it. If that weren't true then nobody would bother baking - we'd all just eat sugar lumps instead.

All you really need is enough sugar in the mix to tell your tongue "this is sweet" and it gets the idea. It doesn't take much more than that to saturate the sweetness receptors completely, at which point you're essentially just wasting sugar from a flavour standpoint.

Starting from a lot of US recipes you could probably cut the sugar down to a quarter of what the recipe calls for and still get great results.
posted by flabdablet at 1:23 AM on September 30, 2021 [3 favorites]

I once read a definition of a cookie as a mixture of sugar and fat with just enough flour to hold it together. So cookies may be a challenge. And there may be times when reducing the sugar means adding a touch of flour.

You may find as you reduce the amount of sugar in a recipe that the result moves from one category to another. For example, the biggest difference between a scone and a biscuit is that the scone has more sugar.

Many recipes for bread and other yeast dough items will call for a small amount of sugar "to feed the yeast". This can be omitted, but the dough will take longer to rise.
posted by SemiSalt at 5:11 AM on September 30, 2021

I make a fair number of recipes from this blog that are lower sugar. They're yummy. My favorites are the giant breakfast cookies and the flourless brownie muffins.
posted by Ms Vegetable at 5:29 AM on September 30, 2021

I've been very happy with the dessert recipies in the America's Test Kitchen Healthy Family Cookbook. There are strategies to use the sweet ingredients more efficiently--chocolate chip cookies that use fewer chips, with some chips reserved to place on top of the cookies, or the applesauce muffins (uses unsweetened applesauce, apple cider and chopped dried apples--finished with a sprinkling of cinnamon sugar for sweetness).
posted by JDC8 at 7:54 AM on September 30, 2021

In general, European sweets are not as... sweet. Try a European desserts cookbook. My husband invariably complains when I make recipes out of mine ... they are not "sweet enough". He grew up on brownies, icing-slathered pound cake, slabs of carrot cake. So I'm not sure I buy the theory about just reducing the sugar. But definitely try a British or European cookbook.
posted by Armed Only With Hubris at 4:08 PM on September 30, 2021