Alternatives to ordinary refined white sugar?

Evening all.

I've found myself baking quite a lot lately, and that typically involves large amounts of ordinary refined white sugar.

I'm a bit concerned about filling the family with such sugar, because we all know its not the healthiest thing, but we have to sweeten things otherwise it just isn't right.

So, I'm looking for suggestions for readily available, affordable alternatives to ordinary refined white.

Any ideas?

I read that demerara is just unrefined raw sugar, and therefore not subject to lots of nasty chemical filtering and bleaching, and that it doesn't have the health risks associated with refined white, but other articles say it is just refined white with artificial colouring and flavouring, so I'm not sure what to believe.

It can't be that difficult or expensive to sweeten things naturally surely.

 

Hi Dave,

I use unrefined sugar for brewing as the refined stuff produces methyl alcohol which gives you a hangover.

Demarara is expensive, there are other raw cane sugars that are cheaper.

Fruit sugars are usefull for sweetening.

Was eating roast beetroot at lunchtime & wondered about using it as a pudding on account of its sweetness.

 

Oh, it will say unrefined on the packet if it is

 

unrefined golden granulated sugar is what we use .... it's a light brown colour and available from tesco .... £2.99 per 2 Kg pack

Tesco Unrefined Golden Granulated Sugar (2Kg) in Tesco | mySupermarket

I do not enjoy the normal white sugar made from sugar beet

 

Depends on what sort of baking you're doing, but a quick search via lord google should throw up several recipes sweetened with alternatives to sugar, you could, if you don't mind artificial sweetners, perhaps use something like Splenda®. I'd prefer natural sweetners though and honey is of course, the first that comes to mind and, being sweeter than sugar, you use less of it.

With varying degrees of success I've cut down the amount of sugar in some recipes and then replaced any liquid in the recipe with something like fresh orange or apple juice - I find this works particularly well in things like sweet pastry. If you're making cakes, you could try using that great war-time alternative to sugar and add some grated carrot or grated apple. I have, when making something like a fruit cake, cup cakes, muffins etc., used (that great standby) mashed banana or instead of blueberries (which to me have no flavour whatsoever), I've used dried sour cherries - or fresh - in fact any fruit which doesn't have too much juice but has a really tart flavour (cranberries are good), if there's another, strong flavour such as the fruit, the lack or reduced amount of sugar is less noticeable.

 

I'm using home grown sugar beet now.

 

Since I started this thread, we've baked a few times with Billington's demerara. I guess the brand is unimportant, it was just cheap in Tesco.

The results are very positive. The flavour is so superior to when we've baked the same stuff using regular refined white, and our 2 year old lad hasn't gone ballistic for 20 minutes after eating the demerara sweetened stuff like he does when we use refined white.

The only possible slight drawback (which hasn't been a problem so far) is that demerara doesn't just sweeten, it introduces a lot of its own flavour. That's fantastic when the recipe suits it, but I suspect when we next do a fruit based recipe like a crumble or something, where the fruity flavour is what we're aiming for, demerara's own flavour might compromise that.

 

How does that work Zig? I know sugar is sometimes taken from sugar beet (hence the name), but how?