If you can’t or won’t eat sugar, here’s a new idea on what to substitute

Sugar substitutes seem to come in and out of fashion and favor. There was Sweet ’n Low and Splenda and stevia and aspartame.

Now there’s erythritol, to which people seem to be attributing magical properties. And they might not be wrong.

In fact, it appears based on the current research that erythritol is a very good product that is generally good for you — or at least, it’s a tasty product that isn’t bad for you. 

I first tasted it a week ago when my friend’s daughter, who is on a keto diet, served us whipped cream made with a sweetener that was half erythritol and half something else. 

It was quite tasty.  I went online and did some research into it.

Erythritol is what’s known as a sugar alcohol. It can be made from a couple different kinds of vegetables and from mushrooms, but usually it’s derived from corn. 

What’s so great about it

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) did a study on erythritol in 2018 that gives it very high marks (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5756564/). 

If you translate the science talk into English, it basically says:

• Erythritol has no calories and no carbohydrates.

• It does not have the bitter or weird taste of many other faux sugars.

• It is one of the only and possibly the only sugar substitute that does not give you diarrhea.

• This should seem obvious but maybe it’s not: Erythritol does not give you any energy. Regular sugar gives you lots of energy. You can see this as a pro or a con.

• Some of the sugar substitutes have a cooling effect, or what the NIH study refers to as “mouth cool.”

Mouth cool is the feeling you get when you eat mint or minty products. Some online reviewers say that erythritol has little to no mouth cool; the NIH study says that erythritol does create a cooling sensation, “due to its high negative heat of solution.” I’m sorry, but I can’t explain what that means.

The NIH study even claims that erythritol has cancer-fighting properties, because it is “a free radical scavenger with the ability to potentially exercise its anti-oxidant activity while circulating the body before it is excreted into the urine.” 

Translation: Free radicals cause cancer; antioxidants “mop them up” and clear them out of your body before they get a chance to damage your cells.

These are all amazing, miraculous qualities in a sugar substitute. So why aren’t we all running out to buy erythritol? 

The downsides

For one thing, you can’t get it at your grocery store. You can order it online and you might be able to get it at a health food store.

But once you find it, you’ll also discover that it’s pretty expensive. On Amazon, you can get a 4-pound bag of Whole Earth  erythritol for $16, which is a relative bargain compared to the $12 per pound you pay for the So Nourished brand. You can read the online reviews to see why the Whole Earth product is less popular than the So Nourished line.  

For the sake of comparison: A pound of regular processed white sugar at your grocery store costs about $2.50 for 4 pounds. 

You’ll also find, if you invest in a bag of erythritol, that it’s not as sweet as regular sugar. 

Happy mediums

This is why there are blends.

At this point in our story, we introduce another non-white sweetener made from monk fruit. This is a fruit that is only grown in one region of China. The sweeteners made from it were only introduced to the American market in 2009. 

The NIH article says erythritol is about 60 to 80% less sweet than processed white sugar; monk fruit is 200 to 300% more sweet.

Like erythritol, monk fruit is a zero calorie/zero carb sweetener. But unlike erythritol, its flavor is not mild or comparable to “real” sugar; people say that foods made with monk fruit taste “weird.” So you wouldn’t want to just use monk fruit in your coffee or sweet tea.

You also, of course, would not use the same volume of monk fruit as you would regular sugar, since it is so vastly much sweeter. You only need a wee bit of it. This is fine if you’re adding it to, say, coffee. But if you’re baking with it, it can throw off the chemistry of your cake because two drops of monk fruit liquid is not the same as a cup of powdery sugar (or erythritol).

So some smart person decided to create a blend of erythritol and powdered monk fruit. A popular version of this can be found on Amazon, made by a Japanese company called Lakanto. I scrolled through about 1,000 questions and answers on the Amazon website for this product, to save you the trauma of doing it yourself. 

And I did the same for a similar product from So Nourished (the company that also sells straight erythritol). 

I did the deepest dive into the Lakanto comments, since this product had more and higher ratings. 

Honesty in packaging

Several people were annoyed at the Lakanto line for labeling their product as a monk fruit sweetener when in fact it is largely made of erythritol. The company won’t say what the ratio is of monk fruit to erythritol but I think if you’ve been paying attention to this article so far, you can assume that the Lakanto product is mostly erythritol with just a few drops of monk fruit. 

Essentially, the monk fruit is there just to boost the sweetness of the erythritol by about 20%, so it equals the sweetness of processed white sugar. 

Because monk fruit is so sweet, you only need a bit of it to add that flavor boost. 

It would of course be better if Lakanto would call its product an erythritol and monk fruit blend; that’s what the So Nourished brand does. But people don’t always do what we want them to do.  

How to use it

I will say that most people claim the erythritol/monk fruit blend bakes very well and is a very good sugar substitute. Both the Lakanto and So Nourished packages claim there is a 1:1 ratio, meaning that if your recipe calls for a cup of sugar, use a cup of blend instead. 

Some bakers say that it’s hard to get the granulated blend to melt and that the final product can be grainy. Buying the powdered version seems to solve this problem. 

Several bakers have shown beautiful cheesecakes in online photos made with the blends. I haven’t seen any photos of cakes, so I will assume that means that the complex chemistry of cake baking doesn’t work well with the blend products. 

Internet comments also indicate that you can’t use monk fruit or erythritol in place of sugar to start yeast.

There is a golden version of the Lakanto blend. Apparently this is made from crushing the whole monk fruit, rather than extracting the sweet juices. It’s described as more maple-y or molasses-y. You could try this if you know you’re going to use your blend on, for example, baked winter squash. 

Winter squash, greens

I find that in autumn I am cooking a lot of winter squash and a lot of heavy greens, especially Swiss chard (see our recipe, page A12). Sometimes I like to add a little maple syrup or brown sugar or a simple syrup when I cook these foods. The sweeteners take away the slight bitterness in the greens and add flavor to the squash. 

It appears from internet comments that you can’t really make simple syrup with erythritol and/or monk fruit. Simple syrup is made by boiling equal parts of water and sugar until the sugar melts and creates a syrup. Apparently when you try this with erythritol it turns rock hard, like candy (which can be fun; and apparently erythritol makes very good royal icing, if you’re planning to make gingerbread houses this year).  

So, if you’re making Swiss chard or winter squash, you can’t drizzle on some simple syrup. You can, however, sprinkle on some powdered erythritol/monk fruit blend, and it should caramelize when you hit it with some heat.

In theory, the blend should also work marvelously well in pumpkin pie (and we know it’s good in whipped cream). 

I apologize for not going out and testing all these recipes myself, but I don’t feel like I’m the person who should be spending $16 on a bag of faux sugar. 

However, if you are unable to eat white processed sugar, or really don’t want to do so, then it looks like the erythritol and monk fruit combination could work wonderfully well for you.