Honey Sugar is often used in recipes as an alternative sweetener to sugar alone. When properly mixed into the recipe, the right texture, flavors, and appearance are achieved. Breads, cookies, and desserts all utilize the many advantages of mixing and breaking down this mixture before adding the rest of the ingredients.
Both sugar and honey contain fructose and glucose. Honey contains other micro nutrients and forms of sugars such as sucrose, maltose, and melezitose. To add a sweet flavors and a smooth texture at the same time, mix both of these sweeteners into your favorite recipe and coffee, tea, or drink. If is often used in recipes such as desserts because this mixture can solidify into crystals. The honey sugar mixture can take two forms a crystalline, such as fudge and fondant, and non-crystalline, such as lollipops, taffy, and caramels. There are many recipe ingredients and procedures that are designed to prevent the grainy texture from non-crystalline mixtures.
It is important to prevent crystals for forming and there are many ways to prevent it. Other kinds of sweeteners also prevent crystallization, so you can use them. Chefs usually use fructose and glucose to achieve this because the large crystals of sucrose have a harder time forming when molecules of fructose and glucose are in the honey sugar mixture.
Another way to break up the crystals in recipes is to add an acidic type of ingredient, such as lemon juice or cream of tartar. Both acidic ingredients and fatty oils are commonly used to help mix in sweeteners when adding them to recipes. Adding these ingredients causes the honey sugar to break down into these two components.
Also, another way is to add a non-sucrose sugar, such as corn syrup or high fructose corn syrup. However, adding more of these type of processed sweeteners make your foods unhealthy. You should use these when it is absolutely necessary.
Another ingredient commonly added to recipes are fats or oils. Fatty ingredients, such as butter, give the recipes a smooth texture because they interfere with the crystallization of sweeteners. For example, toffee is very smooth texture and can be easy broken because it has butter in the mixture. So next time you are planning to use honey sugar in your recipe, keep in mind that it is important to prevent crystallization and to add proper amounts of fat and acid to break it down and properly mix it.
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