The Benefits of Sugar in Cooking: Enhancing Flavors and Balancing Taste

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Sugar is one of the ingredients we use most often in cooking, along with salt. Often, it is controversial.

In all my years of posting recipes, I’ve come to expect questions, comments, and criticism about the amount, type, and even presence of sugar. This is especially true any time a savory dish calls for sugar.

Reactions range from genuine curiosity – what’s the point? – Hostility such as: “Why does sugar have to be in everything?!”

As I wrote about baking, the purpose of sugar is not just to make food taste sweet.

Whether you add some sugar to a delicious recipe or not is up to you, but here’s why you shouldn’t fear it—and why you should seriously consider it.

Sugar can mask unwanted flavors and enhance other flavors

Sweet is one of the five basic tastes, along with salty, sour, bitter and umami. “Sugar has several desirable flavor interactions,” he says, including softening or masking acidity and bitterness Wise PaulAssociate member of Monell Chemical Sensing Center.

Sugar can also counteract saltiness, especially if you overcook, writes my colleague Daniela Galarza.

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Sugar, whether granulated or in another form such as honey, maple syrup, or molasses, more than fights one against the other flavors. “A little sugar in savory dishes has a complex and indirect effect on taste, enhancing flavors that may fade into the background,” he says. wrote the illustrator cook.

“A little of this and a little of that goes a long way,” he said. Daniel Reed, Associate Director at Monell, on the X-factor description of “generally good” dishes. “One of the unsolved mysteries of taste is what happens when we say something that enhances taste.”

He and Wise offered several possibilities. For one thing, because the sweet and umami receptors on the tongue share a site, sugar can also activate some of the umami taste, the satisfying and filling sensation often associated with ingredients like MSG, soy sauce, tomato paste, and others. . Wise says sugar may be a “tickling secondary mechanism” in the tongue’s taste cells that mimics mechanisms in the gut, and sends additional signals to our brains. It’s also possible that even subtle sweetness can enhance odor, Wise said, partly due to a learned connection between how certain foods smell and taste.

Sugar can improve the texture of the mouth

Just as it can enhance taste, says Wise, “it can provide a pleasant and desirable aftertaste.” How sugar affects the physical sensation of food in our mouths is less clear than its general effect on taste.

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Sugar is effective even in small amounts

If you’re a pro at seasoning your food to taste – and you should be! – You’ll know whether it’s sugar, salt, pepper, vinegar or something else, you want to add it little by little until it’s just right for you. At some point, that final or early hit will cause everything to click. And it doesn’t take much.

“The tongue is one of the most amazing chemical detectors on the planet,” says Reed. It is sensitive to micromolar concentrations, or millionths of a mole per liter. (I could try to explain this with exponents, but trust me, it’s minuscule.)

Scale and portion size are also important for maintaining perspective. In this sausage, spinach, and goat cheese lasagna, I called for 1 teaspoon granulated sugar (plus more to taste) to top the dressing made from two 28-ounce cans of mashed tomatoes. That teaspoon may sound like a lot, but look at the portions: This dish feeds 10 to 12 people, so 1/10 to 1/12 teaspoon of added sugar per serving. If, for example, you stick to extension American Heart Association recommendations for limiting added sugars no more than 6 percent of your daily calories, which is six teaspoons for most American women and nine teaspoons for men.

Sugar helps in delicious browning

Sugar is a key ingredient in the Maillard browning reaction, where it reacts with protein amino acids, creating a whole new array of flavor and aroma compounds, with several hundred possibilities. Maillard can occur with natural sugars found in foods, but adding a little sugar to a spice rub, brine, or glaze enhances the effect, along with delicious caramel. Check out my colleague Massoff’s Grilled Brown Sugar Skirt Steak for example. Sugar can also speed up the caramelization of onions.

Sugar in moderation will not ruin your diet

It’s better than I can ever get, says our nutrition columnist Ellie Krieger, cookbook author and nutritionist: “When I add a little sweetener to a recipe, I get an email asking how I can claim a dish is healthy if it contains sugar…

“When it comes to sugar — or white flour, bacon, or butter — it’s best to keep it to a minimum, not that a little bit can be detrimental to the health of your recipe, or your diet in general. views of what is described as good for you are unnecessary, and can eventually backfire.

Instead, taking a more flexible approach, eating mostly nutrient-dense foods, while feeling free to include less healthy ingredients in small amounts, and using them strategically to maximize the enjoyment of healthy eating, is a more sustainable path to long-term well-being. long. long.”

Be smart with your sugar

Wise says people are sensitive to varying degrees of taste, including sugar. The amount of sugar that something needs to taste properly or ferment varies, which is why it requires an open mind and a willingness to experiment.

Getting a light touch is smart from a health and taste standpoint. “There’s disgust when something tastes sweet when it shouldn’t,” says Reid. “If you consciously knew that sugar… you would think it was very sweet.”

Using sugar to balance flavors is easier on a plate because it melts smoothly and adjusts quickly, often just before serving, although you can also taste it while cooking. Sauces, stews, soups and salad dressings would be top of my list.

Keep in mind that not all sweeteners are created equal, so adjust accordingly. Honey, maple syrup and agave nectar are sweeter than granulated sugar, while molasses is less so.

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2023-07-10 16:24:55
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