How Different Sugars Affect Baking (2024)

FAQs

How do different types of sugar affect baking? ›

Sugar Sweetens & Flavors

The first and most obvious role of sugar in baking is that it adds sweetness and flavor. While granulated sugar is a fairly neutral sweetness, other varieties of sugar, such as brown sugar, add more depth of flavor in addition to the sweetness.

Cookie doughs with sucrose (Abboud and Hoseney 1984) and fructose spread laterally more rapidly than cookies with glucose for high solubility and low melting point, and the surface of cookies with sucrose and fructose quickly spread more than cookies with glucose.

Sugar functions in baking as:

Creaming & tenderizing agent: works as an aerator in batter systems. Shelf-life improver: by binding free water and reducing water activity (natural preservative) Freeze-point depression. Texturizer: as a mouthfeel improver.

Baked goods with sugar (and thus more retained water) tend to be softer, moister, and have better shelf life. The more you reduce sugar (without any other adjustments), the drier and more crumbly your baked goods will be — and the shorter their shelf life.

How Does the Type of Sugar Affect the Rate of Yeast Fermentation? While our early ancestors all worked with fermentable sugars, not all fermentable sugars interacted with yeast in the same way. Fructose and glucose are highly fermentable sugars while maltose is harder to break down and convert for yeast cells.

Whether an added sugar contains more or less fructose versus glucose has little impact on health. Some types of added sugar — honey, for example — may also contain micronutrients or other bioactive compounds. But these properties have little benefit when it comes to metabolic health.

The main difference between these sugars is their structure, which affects how your body digests and absorbs them. This distinction means that they may have different effects on your health.

Baking soda increases browning and spreading, resulting in a flatter cookie. Baking powder will give you a puffier cookie. Binding agents are the liquid in the recipe that hold the cookie together. Examples of binding agents are eggs, milk, honey, and fruit juice.

The lower the sugar, the less cookies spread, the drier/more crumbly they are. Cookies with less sugar taste less sweet, of course.

Brown sugar, meanwhile, is dense and compacts easily, creating fewer air pockets during creaming—that means that there's less opportunity to entrap gas, creating cookies that rise less and spread more. With less moisture escaping via steam, they also stay moist and chewy.

How does sugar affect food? ›

Although the main reason for the use of sugar is its sweet taste, sugar has many other functions in food technology. The most important among these are that added sugar in foods acts as a sweetener, preservative, texture modifier, fermentation substrate, flavouring and colouring agent, bulking agent.

Sugar keeps your baked goods from getting too tough.

Well, sugar weakens that bond just a bit and gives your baked goods a more tender crumb (texture). So, instead of a cake that has the structure of a loaf of bread, sugar helps you make cake that has the structure of… cake.

Sugar creates texture

Variances in sugar type will create different outcomes here. A brown sugar will lend more moisture than white sugar, because of the presence of molasses. Sugar also creates crunch in your baked goods.

However, if too much sugar is added (these simple vanilla cupcakes had twice as much as they should have), then not only do they rise to the extreme but the structure takes so long to set (these were baked for 15 minutes longer than a normal batch) that they then collapse dramatically towards the end of baking.

Sucrose is the most common type of sugar. Often called “table sugar,” it's a naturally occurring carbohydrate found in many fruits and plants. Table sugar is usually extracted from sugar cane or sugar beets.

Granulated sugar: Derived from either sugarcane or sugar beets, this is the most commonly used sugar in baking, and for good reason. It's neutral in flavor and has medium-sized, uniform crystals that are small enough to dissolve into batters and large enough to create air pockets when creamed with butter.

Powdered sugar can be used for several purposes in baked goods: Sweetener: provides a sweet flavor. Tenderizer: interferes with gluten formation, protein coagulation and starch gelatinization. Shelf life improvement: reduces the amount of water available for microbial deterioration.

Does it matter what kind of sugar is used in baking? Yes, it matters what kind of sugar you use, as different grinds of sugar (such as superfine v. regular granulated sugar) are going to behave differently in different recipes. And brown sugar would again behave differently.