Baking and Cooking with Healthy Sugars and Sweeteners

A couple of months ago, I wrote “Making Sense of Sweeteners for a Healthy Plant-Based Diet.” In that blog, I compared the nutritional qualities of 12 kinds of sugars and grouped them into the “healthy,” “healthy-ish,” and “unhealthy” categories. For reference, here are the 12.

Healthy

• Whole dates, date sugar, date paste, and ripe bananas

Healthy-ish

• Agave syrup, date syrup, coconut sugar, and maple syrup

Unhealthy

• Brown rice syrup, organic cane sugar, brown sugar, and granulated white sugar

Now I want to discuss how the sugars behave differently in various recipes and preparations. There are major differences that I’ve found I need to be aware of to achieve maximum success with my culinary creations.

Liquid vs. Solid

All of the healthy-ish and unhealthy sugars either start out as liquids (like maple, date, and agave syrup) or they melt when heated (coconut sugar and all the “unhealthy” sugars). This liquid state enormously influences baked goods especially, but other types of recipes as well.

Whole-food sweeteners (whole dates, date sugar, date paste, and bananas) do not melt but rather add their substance and solid texture to recipes. I found this out recently when developing an oatmeal cookie recipe. I started the project by making a conventional vegan recipe that called for white and brown sugars as well as a small amount of oil. When I substituted date sugar for the white sugar and tahini and water for the oil, the cookies were definitely bulkier—the date sugar absorbed liquid and expanded when heated rather than melting like white sugar and disappearing into the other ingredients. (Oil behaves similarly, so the tahini added substance, too.) I decided to keep the date sugar as a substitute for the white sugar and tahini for the oil, but I used maple syrup and a little molasses for the brown sugar so as not to overwhelm the cookies with even more bulk. The result was a rousing success (my recipe testers loved them), even though the texture was definitely different from the original. Actually, I like the healthier version better. (I will post this recipe sometime in the near future.)

What kind of desserts work well with healthy sugars?

Certain types of desserts work very well with whole-food sweeteners. Easy dessert types that you can make with healthy sugars include:

• Nice cream

• Banana bread

• Stuffed dates

• Cookies: peanut butter, oatmeal, thumbprint, black bean or sweet potato brownies, and no-bake cookies

• 100% cacao chips sweetened with date paste

Specific recipes using healthy sugars

I’ve developed lots of dessert recipes using healthy sugars. On my website, check out these desserts that use healthy sugars exclusively.

• Cherry Nice Cream

• No-Guilt Vegan Cookie Dough 

• No-Bake Cocoa Tahini Gems

• No-Bake Oatmeal Cookie Energy Bites

• No-Bake Peanut Butter Wonder Bars

• Pumpkin Nice Cream Sundaes

• Caramel Walnut Dip for Fruit Slices

My Plant-Based Anti-Inflammatory Cookbook features several dessert recipes that use dates and date sugar with no or minimal other sugars.

• Cherry Nice Cream with Raw Brownie Bits

• Walnut and Date Caramel Tart

• No-Baker Cherry Cookie Balls

• Orange-Cherry Cardamom Bars

In the PDF e-book “10 More Anti-Inflammatory Desserts,” given away during my cookbook pre-order season last year, you’ll find other desserts that utilize healthy sugars entirely.

• Berry Parfaits with Gingery Crumbles

• Oktoberfest Apple Cake

• Blueberry and Ginger Cornmeal Cake

• No-Bake Gingerbread Bars

• Creamy Orange Nice Cream

• Mint and Cocoa Nib Nice Cream

• Raw Apple Ramekins

• Berry and Cream Tartlets 

Chef AJ’s cookbook Sweet Indulgence features 150+ recipes that utilize healthy sugars. You’ll never run out of ideas once you have her book.

What desserts don’t work well with healthy sugars?

With the caveat that what “doesn’t work well” is my own opinion, not a research-based fact, here’s my take. Given that dates add bulk, substance, and a dark color to whatever they’re combined with, dates don’t work for me as the only sweetener in some types of desserts.

Cakes

Many types of cake recipes are difficult to re-create with just dates or bananas as the only sweeteners. Cakes need a combination of leavening and lightness to make them rise and structural binding to hold the risen batter in place. Dates and bananas tend to weigh down the batter, which prevents optimal rising and the ability for the ingredients to hold up the structure. That said, heavier versions of some kinds of dark cakes work fairly well, especially chocolate, carrot, apple, and banana cakes. But sponge cakes? White and yellow cakes? Jelly rolls? I haven’t found a way to make these work with dates or bananas.

Cookies

Cookies with a smooth texture and light color, like sugar cookies, chocolate chip cookies, shortbread, macaroons, and spritz cookies, are tough to recreate with dates and/or bananas. Using a combination of dates and a healthy-ish sugar might work. Luckily a number of cookie types do work well with healthy sugars, as listed above.

Shortcakes

I haven’t had any luck recreating my beloved shortcakes, which I especially loved during fresh strawberry season. Given that shortcakes rely on the alchemy of butter/oil, baking powder, and a light mixture of flour and milk or cream, getting close to the same result while substituting for the butter, white flour, and sugar is tough. I’ve come to rely on my healthy-ish gluten-free lemon-poppy seed cupcakes as a base for a pile of fresh strawberries, along with my vegan cream.

Cheesecakes

I haven’t tried making cheesecakes with dates exclusively because the texture and color would likely end up being very different. Perhaps a chocolate cheesecake sweetened with dates or a banana cheesecake could work, but I haven’t tried those.

Sugars in savory dishes

Many Asian recipes feature sweet as well as savory ingredients. Sweet and sour, satay, peanut, chutney, curry, and many other sauces and dishes inspired by Asian cuisine include sugar of some kind. Dates can work well in many savory-sweet dishes. I recently created a recipe for “beefy” Mongolian soy curls. I blended dates and other ingredients for the sauce. This thin, smooth paste was perfect as a spicy-sweet coating of the soy curls.
Here are some other savory recipes of mine that use dates.

• Peanut-Ginger-Sesame Dressing

• Cold Sesame Noodles

• Curried Butternut Squash Soup (Instant Pot)

• Gracious Vegan Massaman Curry

• Sugar-free Mango Chutney

• Mint-Cilantro Chutney

• Tamarind Dipping Sauce

Taste and sweetness of healthy sugars

Finding your preferred sweeteners and level of sweetness is part of the journey of healthy eating and cooking. Sometimes my recipe testers will judge a recipe to be “too sweet” when for me it’s just right. Different sweeteners may taste sweeter to you than others. For example, date syrup and agave syrup taste sweeter to me than maple syrup.

Similarly, the “healthy-ish” sugars in particular have different tastes from each other, and you can make your own decisions. Date syrup, for example, tastes better to me than agave syrup in my granola recipe, but agave syrup is fine in most other dishes. It’s important to judge for yourself. You’ll develop your own preferences as you cook and bake more and more with healthy sugars.

Conclusion

Eating less refined sugar is great for your health—your immune system, gut microbiome, and metabolic function, to name a few specifics. If you work to replace refined sugars with healthy ones as often as possible, you’ll reap the benefits. It takes some experimentation and creativity, but steady new habits in the area of sugar can pay off big time for your overall health and those of the ones you cook for.