Baking with Naturally Sweet Ingredients — instead of Sugar

A Newsletter Bonus: Tips, Insights, and Inspiration from Author and Pastry Chef Brian Levy

I’m pleased to share a little newsletter bonus today, a Q&A with author Brian Levy, whose cookbook Good & Sweet is full of recipes for desserts and baked goods that omit sugar (and concentrated sweeteners, like honey, maple syrup, and coconut sugar) in favor of naturally sweet, whole-food ingredients like freeze-dried and dehydrated fruit and vegetables, as well as dairy, nuts, and other unexpectedly sweet things.

Each recipe I’ve made has delivered on his promise of “restaurant-worthy” dessert, from an ombre fig and ricotta pound cake where freeze-dried blueberries and apples are creamed with butter, to biscuits sweetened with freeze-dried corn, and my new favorite brownies, which feature dates, rye flour, and olive oil.

He shares some baking tips, insights into his approach, and thoughts on reducing waste in the kitchen — and I hope they provide some inspiration, especially as we looking ahead to holiday baking projects!

First, a few links I’ve been meaning to share, and then my Q&A with Brian follows.

• How to Use Your Dishwasher Better — I had to send this with my family chat because ~some people~ still insist on pre-rinsing their dishes.

• I loved this profile of Namiko “Nami” Hirasawa Chen, the force behind the long-running, indispensable blog Just One Cookbook.

• And a few recipes on my radar: Eggplant Bourguignon, Pineapple Kimchi, Tahina Rolls, Hetty’s Vegetarian Thanksgiving Menu

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How does Good & Sweet express your broader perspective on food?     

I’m into the art and science, the history, the pleasure, and the functionality of food. When writing Good & Sweet, it was inevitable that I process each recipe through these filters. I guess my broad perspective on food can be summed up as: healthy food is delicious food, and delicious food is healthy food. That’s not to say I’ve never enjoyed a chocolate chip cookie made with white flour and white sugar. But I truly do believe that a chocolate chip cookie made with a flavorful, whole-grain flour and a complexly flavored sugar tastes better and offers more enjoyment. And I think part of the reason for that is that our bodies know what real food should taste like.

Along with the pleasure of making and eating good food, I wanted to bring a level of mindfulness about ingredients to the kitchen. When you’re handling individual dates, or dried apple slices, etc. — versus cupsful of granulated sugar — you can’t help but be more aware of what was actually grown and harvested to make its way into your food. That’s why I included the Fruit Files in the book, with details about my “star” fruit ingredients. Plus, I’m fascinated by the historical origins of crops as well as their botanical relationships.

Because sugar is also a structural element in dessert — meaning, it does much more than just make things sweet — you write about how you couldn't simply adapt from well-established formulas in these recipes, you had to start from scratch. Was there a top breakthrough moment?

I always had to think about the manifold roles that sugar was playing in a given traditional recipe and how each of those roles would be covered in the absence of cane sugar. Breakthrough moments occurred with individual ingredients. For instance, when I realized I could use the reverse creaming method to coat freeze-dried fruit with fat and thus prevent it from absorbing all of the moisture in a recipe. Or when I turned to milk powder as an emulsifier and stabilizer. Or when I started to deconstruct the elements of chocolate (milk, dark, or white) and introduce them into recipes without the added sugar we find in most bars.

There's a slim but special collection of vegan basics in the back of the book — for vegan milk, milk powder, butter, cream cheese, and creme fraïche. Could you talk about how you approached these?

As with all of the other recipes in Good & Sweet, I had to approach these vegan basics by first asking what functions the conventional version of each serve in recipes. It was a matter of addressing the composition in terms of flavor as well as mouthfeel, texture, and the presence of fats, proteins, water, etc.

Let’s take the vegan milk, for example. To fill in for dairy milk, white and liquid are not the only properties required. It needs fat (which I get from cashews and coconut cream), protein (from cashews and miso paste), sweetness (from cashews, coconut cream, and a date), and a little earthiness and salt (from miso paste). I love the flavor of this milk, but beyond that, it works seamlessly in recipes that call for dairy milk: custards, ice creams, and cakes.

For home cooks wanting to adapt a favorite recipe to cut back on concentrated sweeteners, do you have any advice or general guidelines for where to begin?

I find that you can almost always just omit 15-25% of the sugar called for in a typical American recipe. And I’ve found that you can pretty successfully replace up to half of the sugar in a recipe with date powder (aka date sugar, which is in reality dried, ground whole dates — not a sugar). In porridges or oatmeal, I often use date powder or just dried fruit (as long as the latter is equally distributed so that you get some in every mouthful, you don’t need any additional sweetener!). You can also get creative with how to garnish sweets. For instance, rather than sprinkling powdered sugar over a cake, you can sprinkle milk powder. Instead of sprinkles, use bee pollen.

I've noticed that you don't always call for lining pans with parchment paper. Is there a reason for this? Are you sensitive to minimizing waste as you bake?

I wouldn’t line a pan if there’s enough fat in a recipe to prevent the given item from sticking. And sometimes it’s just as easy to grease and flour a pan as it is to fit a sheet of parchment in.

Where I really did make a conscious effort to avoid waste was with plastic. So much plastic wrap is used in baking and cooking, professional and at-home, and it all ends up in the garbage eventually. I don’t use plastic wrap, and I didn’t mention “plastic” once in the book, which, as small of a thing as it is, I’m proud of. I always wrap and store things in reusable containers, and often in compostable parchment paper, which I can then also use as a baking liner.

Lastly, in your opinion, what's the most underrated dessert?

Hm. This is tough, but I am a custard fanatic, so the first thing that comes to mind is flan pâtissier, the French tart/pie with a thick, sturdy vanilla custard filling in a buttery crust. When I first made the Pear & Vanilla Bean Flan Pâtissier that ended up in Good & Sweet—made sweet with ripe pears and Hunza raisins and with a perfect tender-flaky crust—I was elated. It’s my favorite recipe in the book.

Make sure to check out Brian’s upcoming events, including a popup next Thursday morning at Bonberi Mart in NYC. And for more information, head to his website.