Category Archives: A Year of No Sugar

A Year Of No Sugar: Post 81

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Among my many experiments this year I tried making a No-Sugar Grape Jelly. I had my work cut out for me: if you’ve never made jelly or jam then you might be astounded to know exactly how much sugar actually goes in the average batch. It’s not uncommon at all for a batch of, say, blueberry jam to call for seven cups of sugar. Yes. Seven. This works out roughly to a cup of sugar per pint jar. Think of that the next time you have toast.

Like baking, jam isn’t improvisable. Unlike making a stew or omelette where you can just throw in what you’ve got and get something edible at the end, jam is really a science. In order to get jam or jelly to “set up” correctly, ie: get that gelatinous, not-liquid-not-solid consistency, you have to have an appropriate amount of pectin, which naturally occurs in fruit, and more so in unripe fruit. In the olden days jam must’ve truly been an art form, figuring out what percentage of ripe to unripe fruit to use, testing with a cold spoon to see if after cooking the jam had “set” properly, before beginning the long, hot procedure of “processing” your sterile jars filled with jam to make them seal correctly for storage.

These days, most jelly and jam makers add powdered pectin to the cooking fruit, which ensures that your jam will set up like a golden retriever every time. In recent years, I’ve made many batches of delicious jam in just this way. So I wondered: what if I made a jelly that followed all the instructions, but substituted dextrose for sugar? Would it work?

This was going to be a lonely journey, however. If you a modern canner, then you know that the literature available about canning today is not for the faint of heart. “WHATEVER YOU DO” they all read in the most alarming font they could find, “DO NOT, REPEAT DO NOT TAMPER WITH THESE RECIPES IN ANY WAY OR YOU AND EVERYONE YOU’VE EVER LOVED WILL MOST ASSUREDLY DIE FROM SOME TERRIBLE FLESH-EATING BACTERIA!!!!” I have at least four books with canning recipes and they all say virtually the same thing: no improvisation allowed. NONE. Story’s over, go to bed.

Meanwhile, if you talk to the old-timers, the ones who canned decades ago with things like rubber seals and wax, you get an entirely different story. They all say the same thing: “Oh, it’s fine. Don’t worry. Jam is incredibly hard to spoil! And even if it does mold on the top a bit, you just scrape that bit off and eat it anyway.” !!!! Now, I probably wouldn’t go so far as to eat mold-encrusted jam, but wasn’t there a happy medium we could arrive at here? Was a homemade “no sugar” jam possible?

At the end of September the concord grape vines in my backyard were sagging with fruit and I decided I would try my experiment on these. This adds an extra step- I usually prefer jam with nice big chunks of fruit and skin throughout, but Concord grapes have to be made into jelly, not jam, because of the seeds and tough skins which must be removed. After cooking and straining the grapes through cheesecloth, I began to boil the sweet juice.

Now right here I realized I already had a problem. Juice? I stopped right in the middle of my steaming, juice-slopped kitchen, with the sudden realization. We haven’t had juice since January 1, even as a sweetener, where it crops up often at the health food store. The family rule is: fruit must have corresponding fiber attached. Period. Huh. Why hadn’t I thought of this before? What should I do? Well, I was dying to know if my experiment would work, and, I rationalized, if it did, it could be extrapolated to jams which would include the skins and pulp. But today grapes were what I had to work with. Onward.

Now, every box of pectin from the supermarket comes with a long list of instructions for most types of jam or jelly you might want to make, so I dutifully followed the grape instructions to the letter: After discarding the seeds, skins and pulp, I brought 5 ½ cups of my fresh concord grape juice to a boil in a large open pot on the stove. This, by the way, is the very best part of making jam or jelly- the incredible fresh cooking-fruit smell that permeates every corner of your home. Potpourri has nothing on this. If I were to invent a perfume I think it might be “Concord Grape #5,” or possibly “L’eau de Peach.”

At this part of the procedure, with the boiling fruit in one pot and empty glass jars sterilizing surgically in another, I always feel like I’m engaged in some wonderful alchemical process that will transform some delicious but humble fruit into pure edible magic. They’re so beautiful, jars of jam in translucent hues sitting glinting on our shelves, waiting to remind us in the depths of a Vermont winter what the tastes of summer were. In the case of our concord grapes it’s even better because they’re free: the things grow like weeds in our backyard, no matter how badly we treat them, but due to the seeds and skins they aren’t much of a tasty snack. Without the jelly, this wonderful taste would pretty much go to waste, enjoyed by our backyard birds alone.

So I followed the recipe. After boiling the intense, incredibly purple juice for ten minutes I added ¼ cup of dextrose (instead of the called-for sugar) to a bowl containing the pectin powder and stirred this into the pot. (This is an extra step which you do with what I buy, which is “Low-Sugar Pectin”: it enables you to use less sugar in your jam, say five cups of sugar instead of seven. Seriously.) Brought to a boil, I then added the rest of the dextrose- 3 ½ more cups. Boiled exactly one minute, and then removed from heat and I began ladling into sterilized jars.

Actually, I cooked it a little longer than one minute, trying to ascertain whether the set-up would really occur using the dextrose. It looked right- gelatinous and jelly-ish. But I’d always relied on pectin to do this part for me… The boiling purple lava was ladled into the jars, hot lids screwed on “finger-tip tight” and into the bigger pot they went for the final sterilization. The filled jars boiled underwater for the requisite five minutes before being pulled out with jar tongs to cool on a dishtowel.

The sad news is that my jelly didn’t set. We proceeded to do what jelly and jam makers have done with failed jelly and jam since time immemorial: we had a lovely sauce. The kids liked it on crackers and on toast. It was sweet…ish. Unlike any jelly I’d had or made before, it truly tasted of the unalloyed grapes. Now, if only the set could be improved…

My research continued. I was determined to figure out what went wrong- and I began to learn a lot of disturbing things. For one, guess what store-bought low-sugar pectin has in it? Now, if you can’t guess by now I’m going to be very disappointed. Yes! SUGAR. That’s right: the low-sugar pectin- “for use with less sugar!” has sugar in it. How ironic. How totally predictable.

Turns out, there is a pectin that you can order or find at the health food store that contains NO sugar, called Pomona’s Universal Pectin. (Instead of being activated by sugar, it is instead activated by calcium.) Even Pomona’s, however, doesn’t list recipes omitting sugar- sugar, honey, artificial sweetener and juice concentrate are all listed, but no sign of the No Added Sugar recipe I’ve been searching for.

(Incidentally, I realized, it helps not to call it Jelly or Jam. “Fruit Spread” seems to be the term of choice for No Sugar variants of this process. Recipes are available online for Fruit Spread which look promising, although the ones I found don’t allow for canning. Rather, they produce a batch that lives in the refrigerator or freezer, which is functional if not quite so beautiful. That might be worth a try.)

But still, I wondered, was there some magical reason sugar was absolutely needed in canned jam and jelly? Was I going to kill my family with my homemade grape “sauce”? Why was the answer so strangely, incredibly elusive? Fortunately a few credible resources do exist online to help those of us who wish to cross over to the dark side of messing with/ understanding our canning recipes: both Oregon State and Colorado State Universities have good Extension websites which finally helped explain what I wanted to know: that, yes, sugar acts not only as a flavoring agent, but also acts as a preservative. And it activates the pectin to activate the “set.”

Silly me, this meant I was adding pectin to my grapes, without the required mountain-load of sugar present to activate it. Did putting it my jelly do virtually nothing? Or would dextrose do the same but just require different amounts? Also, tragically, my grape “sauce” would likely have a shorter shelf-life than the average estimate of a year for canned items. I could live with that.

Wow. You’d think they’d cover all this in Canning and Preserving for Dummies, right? But they don’t. Just shut up and follow the recipe, people. And anyway, what kind of crazy person would ever want to make grape jelly without sugar?

A Year Of No Sugar: Post 80

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Ah, Halloween. Parents have developed many strategies for dealing with it, this mother-of-all-candy-holidays. Let me count the ways…

  • My friend Miles says that in Dayton, Ohio the “Switch Witch” comes to visit many of her fellow parents houses the night after Halloween, leaving toys in place of sweets.
  • There’s always bribery. I hear many parents follow the example of the dentist I heard about on NPR: offer to buy the crap to keep it out of their kids tummies. In the case of the dentist, the going rate was $1 per pound, up to 5 pounds. Not bad!
  • I’m pretty sure my Mom adhered to the “Out of sight, out of mind” policy, in which we would eat one piece of candy after dinner for a week or so, and then we’d forget all about it. The remainder would, I’m quite certain, end up in the trash well before it was time to worry about pumpkin pie and cranberry sauce.
  • I know at least one family who simply opts out altogether. They stay home and pick a special family dessert to make instead.

Even if you’re not convinced that sugar is a toxin, most parents seem to get that consuming candy on Halloween-scale is not good. Maybe it’s because of the unfortunate kid every year at the parade or the party who overdoes it and throws up, or maybe we just know, instinctively that consuming a pillowcase full of anything, anything at all, can’t be good.

Of course, nobody eats ALL their Halloween candy, do they? Here’s what we always used to do when I was a kid: after trick-or-treating till our lips turned blue from the late October air (“Mo-oooom! If I wear my coat no one can see my costume!!”) we’d all congregate on the floor of someone’s living room and pour our bags of cheap treats out on the floor to sort and count and trade. I always liked this part the best- we were like little pirates, or maybe bankers, gleefully portioning out the gold coins.

Greta’s Halloween Haul

And now that I have kids, they do this. Monday night our gaggle of kids racing ahead and dutiful parents lagging behind all trooped back to my friend Katrina’s house where the kids immediately took over the living room by unceremoniously dumping several tons of high fructose corn syrup in a variety of colorful wrappers onto her carpet. A frenzy of sorting and showing off and bartering began.

“I have NERDS!”

“Look! A mint-flavored Milky Way!”

“What are these?”

“Who gives out BBQ chips?”

“Oo! What do you want for your Sour Patches?”

Meanwhile, Katrina’s dog Inky was wasting no time. Ignoring the candy completely, he made like a Hoover vacuum when an entire baggie filled with popcorn ended up on the floor, deftly maneuvering around the Tootsie Rolls and tiny boxes of Junior Mints.

I laughed when I saw that our friend Robin had brought homemade mini-cupcakes along for everyone. It reminded me of the Farmer’s Market last weekend when virtually every vendor was plying my children with candy- pressing Starbursts and — into my hand before I could say no… of course they went directly into the trash when we got home.

School Halloween “Snack”

Nonetheless, I have to admit I was astounded on Halloween day to walk into my older daughter’s sixth grade classroom to find all the kids having a Halloween treat consisting of a sugar doughnut and a large handful of assorted candy. My eyes got big. What, did they not feel tonight was going to be sufficient? Did they have to be primed with sugar, pre-event too?

People just can’t seem to help themselves when it comes to the idea of making a child happy. And what easier way to make a child happy than with an inexpensive little bit of sugar? Of course, the problem is, it’s too easy, so everyone everyone EVERYONE wants to get into the act. Robin’s adorable, homemade cupcakes aren’t the problem, it’s all the junk which likely came before that, and will likely come after that too. I know I sound like a broken record, but I truly do think that we’ve simply forgotten that everyone loves to see that smile on that kids face… everyone loves the feeling of making a kid happy. What we need to realize is that it has become SO cheap and SO easy to hand a child a treat, that inflation has set in. No longer is it sufficient for the teacher to bring the kids doughnuts- there has to be a pile of candy next to it. No longer is it sufficient for kids to get a single treat at each house, now many houses go to the trouble of packing little paper candy bags full of several treats each. No longer is it sufficient to have a treat or two (or fourteen) from the candy bag that night, we have to provide dessert on top of that. Because, what else do you do? It’s Halloween! Or Christmas! Or Valentine’s Day! Or somebody’s birthday! Or you’re just feeling depressed! Or happy! You see what I’m getting at here.

Sweet Poison author David Gillespie told me that he’s always interested to watch what happens to American kids after Halloween: they all start getting sick. Sure, you could blame it on the change of temperature, but what if it’s not just that? Would we all be so quick to dole out those easy-to-come-by bits of happiness to children if we knew it was going to hinder their immune systems? Would we view it the way we view handing out free cartons of cigarettes to soldiers now?

Then again, I still love Halloween. I spend much of the month of October getting ready for it, picking out costume patterns and fabric with my children, and then sewing like a madwoman. When the appointed night comes, we venture forth, armed with flashlights and reflective tote-bags and cameras, not to mention the optional umbrellas or long-underwear . We tromp around West Pawlet Village with our friends, often running into other groups and joining up like packs of amiable, gaudily-dressed and highly-supervised wild animals.

Then, this year, the most amazing thing happened. Early on, our group had effectively snowballed to an impressive size- perhaps thirty or more adults and kids found ourselves congregated in the parking lot of the West Pawlet Fire Department. Out of nowhere something was happening. Grown-ups were yelling “Stop! Stop! Everybody come over here! Everybody join hands!”

As we all looked around blankly, trying to discern what exactly was going on, it became clear that my friend Sue was orchestrating something. All thirty or so of us large and small and costumed and not put down our flashlights and bags of candy and joined hands.

Once we were all in an enormous circle, Sue let go hands at just one spot so we formed a curved line. Then she began walking around the interior of our circle, making a spiral inward, inward. And because we had all joined hands, we were all walking too, following her, passing each other, giggling and making faces and talking to one another animatedly.

Once she got to the middle-middle-middle and could go no further she turned 180 degrees and began to walk a spiral back out again. Have you ever done this game? It seems like something I must’ve done at camp or elementary school or something, but never, never had I done it on a moonlit night in the parking lot of the West Pawlet Fire Department with a group of parents and children I love so well. And never before with a group of tiny Mad Hatters and queens and monkeys and fairies and zombie monsters. As we spun around and around the wheel of our friends and children, it felt like we had joined the witches themselves to perform a rite of autumn. It felt positively pre-Christian.

Isn’t it something like this- that is so much harder to achieve than that fleeting bit of happiness that comes in a plastic wrapper- that we really want from our holidays? A sense of connection, of community, of ritual, of transformation? You can’t buy that by the bag down at Rite Aid, and I suppose that’s how it should be.

A Year Of No Sugar: Post 79

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“Crap!” I banged the steering wheel with my palm. “Rats!” I was driving back to Vermont after meeting, last week, with one of the sources of great inspiration for this project: David Gillespie.

In fact, everything had gone great. Despite my unpredictable health as of late, I’d managed to sufficiently finagle my schedule (and that of my family) soon after I found out the author of Sweet Poison was going to be in New York City for a few days and had offered to meet up with me.

Of course, getting anywhere from rural Vermont is a bit of a task, but since I wasn’t planning on being in his stomping grounds (Australia) anytime very soon, it seemed like a unique opportunity. So, dressed up and bleary-eyed, I left home at 6:45AM, drove to the suburb of White Plains, hopped on the commuter train and was dumped out in Grand Central in time to meet him for lunch at 1PM. Phew!

In fact, I was early. Really early. And nervous. I started to have “What if…?” thoughts. What if he thinks I’m a moron? What if this lunch will necessitate an involved conversation about GLUT proteins and the role of the hypothalmus? What if my writing is waaaay more interesting than I am in person?

I know, I know. But these are the things one worries about when you get to the restaurant where you’re supposed to be meeting one of your big inspirations and you have a full hour to get anxious. I was just deeply grateful that my car hadn’t failed me, the train hadn’t been late, I hadn’t gotten lost, I didn’t feel nauseous and it wasn’t a bad hair day.

And of course, I needn’t have worried. David Gillespie, I am happy to report, is about as easy-going a guy as you’re going to encounter. He’s reserved, witty, and quietly passionate about his work. Like me, he’s the kind of person who prefers to state his case in print, and let others make of it what they will, and who isn’t especially fond of having to “sell” people on his ideas in person.

In fact, he didn’t start out to make a No Sugar movement. Rather, he says, when folks were curious how he had managed to lose such a tremendous amount of weight, he would reply “I stopped eating sugar.”

“Well, of course, that wasn’t good enough!” Gillespie laughed over lunch. “So I decided to write the book. And then I could tell them to read that!”

It worked so well that Gillespie has sold over 200,000 copies of Sweet Poison in Australia, and many more of the follow-up companion book The Sweet Poison Quit Plan. Gillespie told me that was the motivation for his twenty-some-odd hour flight to America: to find a publisher to distribute these volumes in the U.S. (Currently, purchasing these books in the U.S. requires they be sent from Australia at a premium.)

And the book’s power to convince has worked well. I was amazed to hear that in Gillespie’s children’s school, in addition to making provisions for children with allergies and food sensitivities, they also make provisions for kids who aren’t eating sugar. Let me say that again: they make provisions for the children who aren’t eating sugar. As many as ten different children in a single grade level.

!!!!

Greta’s Testing Treats

By way of contrast, I related the story of my older daughter’s recent standardized testing, which went on for three days, the by-product of which was a tiny mountain of treat wrappers which she dutifully carried home for me to see. “And this doesn’t include the ice cream every day!” she added, helpfully. I know the teachers are simply rewarding the kids for their hard work and that their intentions are entirely well-meaning. I know not everyone sees candy as a bad thing, but rather a harmless, inexpensive way of bestowing a little innocent affection on children.

However. At what point will we begin to realize our goodwill has run amuck? Your honor, I present Exhibit B: yesterday, at the Farmer’s Market of all places- where we buy much of our organic produce and hormone-free meat- there was candy bloody everywhere in anticipation of impending Halloween festivities. At this point, despite telling myself everyone’s intentions were kind, I was starting to get a little peeved. “What, do they not think they’ll be getting enough candy tomorrow?” I muttered. “Is an entire pillow-case-full not enough??” After demurring the bowl of cheap treats that was proffered, at nearly every single table, one fellow held out to us a bowl of brightly colored hot peppers, causing us to double-take. He laughed and assured us that the next table had candy.

“Yes,” I said, grimly. “There’s always candy!”

Lucky for Gillespie (who is father to six children, all of whom are subsisting un-deprived on No Sugar) they don’t have Halloween in Australia. They also don’t have High Fructose Corn Syrup. But they do have all the same sugar-related health problems as Americans (diabetes, heart disease, obesity, etc.), which surely negates the argument that HFCS is any worse than plain old familiar sugar.

Halloween Hot Peppers

I learned this, and so many other interesting things at our lunch. I learned that balsamic vinegar isn’t really vinegar and is fortified with sugar. I learned that Crisco was invented in 1911. I learned that Gillespie’s next two books will detail what he feels is the other great dietary scourge of our time: seed oils. (Canola, vegetable, corn, hydrogenated oils etc.) According to Gillespie, these are even harder to ferret out than sugar, and are the other piece of our health puzzle, namely: cancer. Whoa.

I learned that Gillespie and I read all the same books and that his first book was tentatively titled “Raisin Hell” because somebody, somewhere, got confused and thought the book was about the dangers of “Fruit Toast.” (Get it? Fructose? Ha ha!!)

And I thoroughly enjoyed having lunch with perhaps one of the only people on the planet who would nod knowingly when I blurt out “And what’s the deal with agave!?!”

So why was I so annoyed on the drive home? I realized, way-belatedly, that I had completely forgotten the bloggers code: Always. Take. Pictures. Did I take a picture of me and him? Did I take a picture of what we ate? The restaurant? The bum outside? Anything??? Nope. You know, sometimes it’s a wonder I manage to leave the house with my head still attached. Oh well.

But I know what you’re wondering: where do two No Sugar proponents eat for lunch in New York City? We ate at Les Halles (fittingly, the restaurant of another of my favorite writers, Anthony Bourdain.) We had some very nice steaks and french fries. And a side salad… with no dressing.