Understanding the Ingredients: Sweeteners

We often think of baked goods as being sweet. Sweeteners play an important role in the world of food and baked goods

When using sugar most people think of it only as a sweetener. For example, adding a teaspoon to your coffee or sprinkling a little over a strawberry. However, when using sugar in baking, its role becomes more complex as it also adds volume, tenderness, texture, color, and acts as a preservative.

When a recipe calls for creaming together the fat and sugar this is not simply a way of mixing these two ingredients together. The purpose of doing this step is to get air into the batter. This mixing causes the sugar granules to rub against the fat producing air bubbles in the fat. Later when the leavener is added, the leavening gases enlarge these air bubbles and cause the batter to rise when place in the oven. The length of time you cream the butter with the sugar determines the amount of air incorporated into the batter.

Sugar also attracts moisture in batter, reducing the amount of gluten formed in the flour. The result of this is twofold. First, less gluten in the batter produces a baked good with a tenderer crumb. Hence, recipes that contain a high sugar content produce a baked good with a tenderer crumb. Second, because not as much gluten develops, the batter will be lighter. When baked, the batter will be able to rise more and the result will be a baked good with more volume.

The ability of sugar to hold moisture also prolongs the shelf life of baked goods. Liquid sugars hold more moisture than other types of sugars. Just as brown sugar will hold more moisture than granulated white sugar.

You may have wondered why batters brown in the oven. The browning is the result of the sugar reacting with the protein in other ingredients (eggs, milk) when heated: crust formation and browning. The higher the sugar content the darker the crust.