Cooking without sugar can be a challenge despite the fact that there are literally hundreds of recipes for cooking with sugar substitutes online. There are also dozens of cookbooks out there that focus on sugar-free cooking, and every month at least one women’s magazine features sugar-free recipes for dieters and diabetics.

However, none of these sugar substitute resources will do you any good if you have a favorite recipe that calls for sugar.. Should you find yourself in this predicament, you’re mostly on your own to figure out just how to remove the sugar from your recipe without destroying the recipe itself. Understanding the role of sugar and how it works in your recipes can help you make better decisions on how to modify your favorite desserts, glazes and baked goods.

What exactly does sugar do in your recipes?

Sugar adds more than just sweetness to your recipes. This is especially true with recipes that are baked, boiled, fried, or cooked by some other means. The way that sugar reacts to heat and interacts with other ingredients in the mixture is very much essential to the success of the recipe. If you don’t understand exactly what role sugar plays in your recipes, you’ll most likely end up doing hit-or-miss modifications to your favorites. And while you may get lucky from time to time, chances are that your food will turn out wrong more often than not. The following are some of the roles that sugar plays in your recipes and ways you can reduce or remove the sugar from the recipe entirely.

Sugar as a sweetener

Most people think of sugar as a sweetener with good reason – that is the substance’s most familiar role in food. Sugar’s most important role in foods such as custards, drinks, ice cream and candy is to sweeten them. In recipes where sugar is there mainly present to sweeten the pot, you can easily replace the sugar with a sugar substitute. There are many choices of artificial sugar substitutes, but the one most commonly recommended to replace sugar is Splenda Granulated. Splenda Granulated is created to pour and measure exactly like sugar, so using it is as simple as substituting it on a one for one ratio in your recipes. Besides a slight difference in taste, the only difference you’ll notice when substituting with Splenda in deserts like custard and pudding is that they won’t set up quite as thick.

Sugar as a rising agent

Texture and moisture

Sugar also contributes to the texture and the moisture of your finished baked goods. This will definitely be the case when you’re baking fruit breads, carrot cakes and other moist baked goods that use brown sugar. If you don’t need to remove ALL the sugar from the recipe, you can try replacing the white sugar with an artificial substitute and leaving the brown sugar intact. If you are looking for more precision, Splenda also makes two sugar blends – Splenda Blend and Splenda Brown Sugar blend – which replaces half the sugar content with sugar substitute and bakes just as well as 100% sugar.

Though recipes like angel food cake and pound cake need sugar for their texture you can still cut out about 25% of the sugar and replace it with a sugar substitute without substantially changing the texture of the finished product.

If you prefer to get rid of all the sugar, you can also try one of these tricks:

-         Substitute applesauce or a fruit puree for the sugar, and add vanilla to intensify the sweet flavor.

-         Use apple juice or white grape juice in place of some of the liquids called for in your recipe.

-         Mix fruits in recipes to accent flavors. For instance, adding berries or cherries to apples makes apple pie filling much sweeter.

-         When baking cookies without sugar, use a fork to press the dough down lightly before baking as the presence of sugar helps cookies to spread out during the baking process.