How Chefs Use Less Sugar

Most people cook with more sugar than they need, and not because they want things sweeter — because sugar is the easiest tool for fixing a dish that tastes flat.

There are better tools. Here is how professional kitchens get there.

Salt makes things taste sweeter

This is the one that surprises people. A pinch of salt in a dessert does not make it savory; it makes the sweetness more pronounced.

Salt suppresses bitterness, and bitterness is what masks sweetness. Remove the bitterness and the sugar that is already there comes forward.

Every custard, every chocolate dessert, every fruit compote I make has salt in it. Try a caramel sauce with and without and the difference is not subtle.

Acid does the same work from the other direction

A squeeze of lemon in a fruit dessert makes the fruit taste more like itself. The sourness gives the sweetness something to push against, and the whole thing reads as brighter and more intense.

This is why a lemon tart with the right amount of acid tastes sweeter than one without, despite identical sugar.

Vinegar works the same way in savory cooking. A tomato sauce that tastes thin does not usually need sugar — it needs a splash of vinegar and more salt.

Let the ingredient do it

Fruit at its peak needs very little help. Strawberries in June, figs in August, quince in autumn — the sugar is already there.

Out of season, roasting concentrates what little sweetness there is. Roasted carrots, roasted pears, roasted onions all end up sweeter than they started, because the water leaves and the sugars caramelize.

This is free sweetness. It costs you nothing but oven time.

Brown the onions properly

In savory cooking, the single biggest source of sweetness is onions cooked slowly.

Three minutes of frying gives you sharp onion. Fifteen to twenty minutes on low heat gives you something genuinely sweet. Most recipes that call for a pinch of sugar in a sauce are compensating for onions that were not cooked long enough.

Spices that read as sweet

Cinnamon, vanilla, cardamom, nutmeg and star anise all carry associations with sweetness. Add them and a dish tastes sweeter than the sugar in it accounts for.

Vanilla in particular. A dessert with real vanilla can carry noticeably less sugar and nobody notices.

Reduce, do not sweeten

A sauce that tastes weak usually needs to be reduced, not sugared. Cooking liquid away concentrates everything in it, including whatever natural sugars are present.

Sugar added to a thin sauce makes it sweet and thin. Reduction makes it rich.

Where you cannot cut it

Some sugar is structural, not a seasoning.

In meringue, sugar stabilizes the egg white — cut it and the whole thing collapses. In jam, sugar is what sets it and preserves it. In ice cream, sugar controls the freezing point; reduce it and you get a block of ice. In caramel and in most baking, sugar does chemical work that nothing substitutes for.

Know which of the two you are dealing with. When sugar is a seasoning, you can almost always use less. When it is structural, leave the recipe alone.

The practical version

Next time something tastes flat, before you reach for sugar, try in this order: more salt, a little acid, longer cooking. Nine times out of ten one of those three is what the dish actually wanted.