Category Archives: A Year of No Sugar

A Year Of No Sugar: Post 63

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August is here and as usual my summer begins to feel a bit panicky right about now. Summer is so very fleeting here in Vermont, that I never feel like we can fit it all in: picnics and swimming and puppet shows and berry picking and parades and the Farmer’s Market and the circus and- and- AND! Technically it’s just the beginning of August, but when I look at my calendar all I can see is a high-speed runway leading directly up to the first day of school.

But this year the summer to-do list includes a few new items: experimenting with recipes, cooking at home more than ever before and finding clever ways to avoid summer staples like store-bought ketchup, mayonnaise, and hamburger buns. (And don’t even get me started on the S’mores “kits” they sell in our supermarket… as if you need to be a rocket scientist to assemble the ingredients for S’mores.)

So the other day I answered a question that’s been bothering me since we began the No Sugar project: how important is sugar to a bread recipe? I’ve been a royal pain-in-the-tookas on this one, refusing bread in restaurants over the protestations of well-intentioned waitstaff that the amount contained therein was really, very, very small. Always, there was the implication that the bread simply couldn’t be made without the sugar. I wondered, was the sugar somehow necessary to proper yeast growth? How much better would bread made with sugar really be?

I set out to find out. Using my King Arthur Flour cookbook, I prepared two batches of bread dough: one adding the called-for tablespoon of sugar in the yeast-proofing stage, the other not. During the process of the rising, kneading and baking I became convinced the sugar-containing bread would win in a walk. The yeast looked bubblier, the dough rose better, the final loaf had a better browning on the crust.

But it was like the story of the tortoise and the hare… despite looking somewhat sad and anemic throughout the entire making and baking process, in the end I found that the no-sugar loaf caught up. By leaving it in the oven a few minutes longer I got the desired browning on the crust… the loaves looked indistinguishable. When I held a taste test composed of my family and some friends, two preferred the sugar-bread, one preferred the no-sugar bread, and one said they tasted the same. Clearly the difference was subtle. Can you make good bread without that tablespoon of sugar? Yes.

The Difference An Egg Can Make!

Then this week I returned to a snack/dessert recipe I’ve always loved: Apricot-Lemon-Date Bars. I had made these much earlier in the year, substituting banana for the brown sugar, which works fine, but results in a very banana-date-y taste which- if you sweeten everything with bananas and dates for a while, like I did- gets pretty monotonous after awhile. I returned to the recipe, this time armed with my giant container of dextrose. The first time through, however, was disappointing: making the recipe by simply substituting dextrose for brown sugar resulted in a pasty, overly crumbly mess of a bar, which tasted okay but didn’t hold together nicely and didn’t brown in an appealing way.

Back to the drawing board. Between the dextrose and the dried apricots and dates the bars were plenty sweet, but what would make the crust hold together better and brown better? I decided to try adding one egg to the crust and see what happened.

Now, this is kind of a big deal for me. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a recipe follower; I’m very literal. I’m the kind of cook who waits the last ten seconds on the timer before dumping the pasta water out. Experimenting is entirely outside my comfort zone. However, I am living proof that being hungry and sweet-deprived will do wonders for one’s adventurousness in the kitchen.

You know what? It worked! The egg added just the right cohesiveness to make the crust crumbly rather than dusty, and the browning was perfect. They’re not just good- they’re really good! I am so proud of myself that it’s kind of ridiculous. You’d think I just invented the S’mores Kit.

•••••••••••••••

Eve’s Apricot Lemon Date bars

(adapted from the Date Bar recipe in Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home)

  • 2 cups chopped pitted dates and dried apricots
  • juice of one lemon
  • ½ cup water

•••••••••••••••

  • ½ cup butter, softened
  • ¾ cup dextrose
  • 1 egg
  • 1 ¾ all purpose flour
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • ½ teaspoon baking soda
  • 1 cup rolled oats

Preheat oven to 350.

In a saucepan combine dates, apricots, lemon juice and water. Cook covered, on low heat for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. Remove from heat and set aside.

In a bowl, cream together the butter and dextrose. Add egg and continue to mix. Stir in flour, salt and baking soda. Finally, add the oats and mix with your hands. Press two-thirds of the crumbly dough into an oiled 8 or 9 inch square baking pan. Spread fruit mixture over the dough. Crumble remaining dough on top. Bake for 30 minutes. Cool in pan. Cut into bars.

A Year Of No Sugar: Post 62

A Year of No Sugar, , , ,

I’d just like to state, for the record, that I’m really, really lucky. I know. I have two incredible daughters who like food. REAL food… things like calamari and miso soup and chicken liver pate. Sometimes, when I forget how lucky we really are, I’ll be reminded by the apprehensive look of a waiter or dining companion who will cautiously ask, “Do you think they will…?”

“Eat that? Sure!” I respond without thinking. Later, I realize what they were really asking: “Will your child melt down if anything other than mac n’ cheese or chicken nuggets fails to appear at their place setting?”

Ilsa, our six year old, is especially interested in food, possibly because she is always hungry. She’s the child who takes twice as long as everyone else at the table to finish her dinner, and then five minutes after the plates have been cleared asks if there’s anything to eat. Frequently, she will ask when lunch is, entirely unaware that we’ve already eaten it. The ongoing Ilsa-refrain is “Mom- I’m still hungry. Do you have any food in your purse?” And because I’m Ilsa’s mom, I almost always do.

This combination of appetite and willingness to try new things came in handy the night we went to the “Teatro del Sale” in Florence- an absolute highpoint of our trip. It had been highly recommended to us by a very gracious local, and she assured us that it would be fine for the kids as well. All we knew was that it involved dinner and a “show” or some sort. We should call to reserve our places, and go early in order to “join,” whatever that meant.

We arrived at 7:30 on the dot, dressed up and out of breath from hurriedly walking several blocks in an unfamiliar part of town- off the beaten path of the historic “centro.” After some confusion I ascertained in my mish-mosh Italian that we each had to fill out forms- the kids too- and pay a small fee to “join” the “cultural circle.” Once this was accomplished, we were given gorgeous membership cards that put my Vermont driver’s license to shame and we stumbled inside, where we could now pay for our evening’s attendance at… whatever this was.

It wasn’t cheap- at 30 euro per person I fervently hoped this definitively included everything. I learned it did once the helpful man at the cash register began speaking English unprompted in order to be sure we understood the way the evening would work. Oh well, so much for my flawless Italian.

It would be a buffet, he described. VERY long. There would be, as he put it, “surprises.” Wine and water were self-serve by carafes in the lobby, please, take it easy. I wondered if the emphasis on pacing ourselves over the course of a “VERY long” meal was because we had small children, or because we were Americans. I was a little apprehensive: I mean, how long was LONG?

Turns out, LONG is about two hours. Heck- practically ever Italian meal we ever had took about that long. I could see, however, that it would be easy to go overboard in an atmosphere such as this one. At the far end of the room, there was a buffet table featuring a battalion of help-yourself casseroles, salads and breads: cous cous, hummus, warm potato salad, lentils, shiny beets. Just when we thought we had amassed plenty of food on our plates and found seats, suddenly a man’s head appeared in the window of a glass wall that showcased the kitchen- where all kinds of things seemed to be going on- and he began to bellow as if announcing the contenders in an important boxing match. (“And in this cor-NAH!”) Although I never managed to catch it all, it became clear that every few minutes he was heralding the presentation of a new dish, and that if you wanted to try some, now was the time to sidle up to the window and receive a bread-plate sized portion of it.

The girls caught on very quickly to this arrangement and soon it was hard to keep them from popping up and down like little Jack-in-the-boxes. We tried nearly everything as the courses rolled out one by one: chicken meatballs, fish soup, tiny clams in spicy broth, roast chicken and potatoes, tubular pasta with meat sauce… As advised, we tried to pace ourselves- but the girls were in heaven, particularly Ilsa.

“When’s he gonna yell again?” she kept asking.

“These are so yummy I just can’t stop eating them!” she proclaimed about the mussels dressed with lemon juice, garlic and olive oil.

“If this is still here, when I grow up, I might want to work here,” she added at one point, after all, “I could eat all the leftovers after!” At another moment she pointed out that she was sure to return to Florence someday, “I would come here so I could eat this yummy food!”

I sat back and marveled at my children. How many six year olds, I wondered, would have felt similarly after being served unshelled shrimp so tiny and leggy they looked like large bugs? Certainly, we weren’t the only tourists in the room- we heard a fair amount of English as we traipsed back and forth to bring our used plates to the dish window (another custom here) but ours were the only children.

At last, it was time to round out this fantastic culinary parade. Greta returned from her four dozenth trip to the kitchen window to report that they were serving ice cold glasses of dessert.

“It’s peach gelato,” she said tentatively, avoiding my eyes.

“And we are going to have it!” I added, with enthusiasm. Greta and Ilsa’s faces lit up like they had been plugged in. Looking back, this was the best sugar decision I made on the trip; as far as I’m concerned, everything else could have fallen away- all the other treats, both intentional and not- but for that one joyful evening, magical meal, and sweet perfect peach gelato.

After that, there was still more in store for us. The tables, which had seated perhaps one hundred “cultural circle” members, were whisked away and the room was filled with the sounds of scraping chairs and multi-lingual chatting as our dining room transformed into a performance hall, facing a modest stage at the far end of the room. We learned that the show tonight would be a cuban trio, accompanied by dancers.

For me, it was all like a very, very happy dream. As I sat there in the audience, wonderfully full of perfect bites of food and gulps of red wine, deeply breathing in the robust strains of guitar, I had one of those heart-breakingly rare moments when you feel that something has gone, somehow, incredibly, inexplicably, perfectly, right.

Sometime later, Ilsa made one more comment to me on the topic of travel. “It’s just that food around the world is so good!” she exclaimed.

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

A Year Of No Sugar: Post 61

A Year of No Sugar, , , , ,

So here we are on the plane coming home from our family trip to Italy, and I’m not at all sure how to feel about the way No Sugar went over the last two weeks. On the one hand, you could say we did really well… we drank cappuccino while everyone around us had gelato. We drank water, water and more water. When we met up with relatives and extended family in Northern Italy they were kind enough to make special requests for us at restaurants and to engineer no-sugar versions of things like Barbecue Sauce for us when we ate in. We held fast to our individual exceptions and steered clear of so many fun European treats we would’ve loved to have: Nutella, flavored yogurts, those funny little snack cookies that Europeans do so well. We looked the other way when passing elaborate shop windows filled with pyramids of chocolate truffles, fancy meringues and exotic looking candies.

Can You Guess Which Yogurt Has Sugar??

And, as I mentioned before, sugar is easier to separate out in a place like Italy, easier to spot than in America where its presence is so much more insidious and pervasive. It’s true that ordering water instead of soda is actually considered a respectable option in Europe, whereas in America it’s somehow slightly looked down upon as slightly odd or cheap. (“Oh, you’re just having water?”) And sure, I was well supplied with my big bag of Snacks For Emergencies including Larabars, coconut cookies and any fruit we managed to pick up along the way… not to mention that we guiltily threw away more sugar than I care to think about: complimentary Swiss chocolate bars, Italian Baci, a large tub of “Tiramisu” ice cream.

And yet…

Yet, like some sort of mutant slime from a cheesy horror movie, I kept feeling sugar creeping back in... around the ancient marble door frames and through the windows’ bulky wooden shutters, following us like shadows along the tourist-jammed streets. Small things, mostly. Once, Steve accidentally came home from the supermarket with a large vanilla yogurt rather than plain. Once, while staying the night in a B&B I put granola on my plain yogurt in desperation to avoid the Nutella and sweet yellow cake that constituted my other breakfast options, all the while looking the other way while my kids ate Cornflakes. (Cornflakes! Horrors!) Once, in a cafeteria across the street from the Duomo, we picked out what we thought were strawberries and yogurts for the girls’ snack, only to discover all that white stuff was whipped cream… not yogurt. Once, while having our unsweetened cappuccinos for a snack, we were sufficiently crazed with peckishness that we ate the hard little gingerbread cookies that had thoughtfully been placed on the saucers. Yes, these are the things that keep me up at night: whipped cream ambushes and postage-stamp-sized complimentary cookies.

Then again, other things are bigger. Twice our whole family succumbed to the siren song of gelato- (only once, in my opinion was worth it: peach, with little bits of skin throughout.) With an average of 95 degrees each day in Florence, and an average of fourteen tourists slurping a cone for every ten you passed on the street, keeping it to only twice was quite the superhuman effort.

Once, I heard our affable waitress describe the Tiramisu dessert as “buonissima” and I- swept away by the joy of a delicious meal and the fact that I was understanding far more of the Italian conversation than I had expected to- impulsively ordered two for the girls… only to have it not be all that “buonissima” after all. Phoo.

Once, we partook of thin slivers of a delicious Crostata Ciocolatta which was the birthday dessert of our now eight-year-old cousin whose family we met up with in Northern Italy. This was in the Dolomites, an alpine region of Italy so far to the North that prior to World War One it was part of Austria… and, as it turns out, a very dangerous place in which to send my husband off to the bakery. The first time he found the bakery as if in a trance, wafted in on the scent of a fresh apple strudel, which he promptly bought- helplessly- only to then give away to the extended family we had met up with. The second time he came home with a combination of sweet and not-sweet pastry, and by the third time he was arriving home with little marzipan hedgehogs and delicately wrapped bars of chocolate embedded with animal crackers or hazelnuts. I knew we had to get out of there, quick.

Nonetheless, it’s worth noting that none of these “sweet” treats, when tried, yielded that sugar blast Americans are so fond of… While an apple strudel or chocolate pie in the United States wouldn’t be considered worth it’s salt if it failed to make your teeth ache, the things we tried in bites here and there truly surprised us: apple strudel actually tasted like apples; the chocolate pie tasted of pastry and cream. No explosion of sweet; no King Kong-sized portions. When we saw a Ben & Jerry’s in Florence, I wondered what the Italians thought of flavors like Chocolate-Chip-Cookie-Dough Ice Cream and Phish Food (doesn’t that have caramel and gummy bears in it?), when juxtaposed with the elegant subtlety of a, say, peach gelato? Do they think we’ve completely lost our minds?

Back in Florence, on the last night, after very kindly being served complimentary biscotti as we tried to pay the dinner bill (help!) Steve and the girls had a goodbye treat of yet another gelato (that’s three, for those keeping score) while I abstained. By that time I could feel the ground moving beneath me. I agonized as I packed my suitcase. We had had so much more sugar here than we would have at home, yet so very much less than we would have had if not for The Project… What did that mean? Had we been good? Or not so good? Both, I imagine. In fact, I suppose the answer was that we were human.

Oh, and yes, we had a great time… thank you. Of course, most vacations, no matter how much fun, have to end. Lucky for us.