The cooking class that I’m teaching at Mills College started today. I devoted the first class to tasting different salts, sugars, vanilla’s, and butters. I wanted everyone to get an overview of the variation of flavors in these products so they can see how these differences can enhance their end product and hopefully expose them to ingredients they may never have tried on their own.
Of course there are tons of sweeteners and sugars in the world but I decided to focus on three, I chose cane sugar, palm coconut sugar, and granulated honey. There are those who say sugar is sugar and there’s no such thing as a healthy sugar. Who knows? I just know that people have been eating things with sugar in them as long as there has been sugar and my guess is it’s more about the quantity of sugar that you consume in the course of the day than it is about the actual substance. Of the three sugars we explored it’s the Palm Coconut sugar that has the healthiest profile, and a lower glycemic index than the other two sugars. In thinking of a good vehicle to taste the sugars I decided I’d make three batches of shortbread. I used exactly the same recipe for all three sugars and baked them all in the same manner (one pan on the top shelf of the oven) so that we could see the differences as well as taste them. I can’t say that there was a clear winner. Some liked the Palm Coconut best, some the granulated honey, and others the cane sugar. The more natural less processed sugars resulted in cookies that lost their crunch a tad faster than the cane sugar cookies.
If you’ve experimented with other sugars and sweeteners let me know, I’d love to hear about it.
