Replacing Sugar Mastery Program: Q&A 37 with Elaina Love Copyright 2011 by The Vegetarian Health Institute Hi, this is Trevor Justice. After listening to this Q&A call, please review it. You’ll find a review box at the bottom of this page. Or if you’re listening on your iPod or MP3 player, just return to the page you downloaded the recording from. Feel free to critique the advice, the quality of the audio or anything else. To keep improving our content, we will redo any Q&A call that doesn’t get excellent reviews. By the way, if you want transcripts of all 50 Q&A calls, please visit www.veghealth.com/transcripts. Q: Hello, everyone. This is Trevor Justice with the Vegetarian Health Institute. Our guest expert tonight is Elaina Love. How you doing, Elaina? A: Doing great. Glad to be here. Q: I tried to summarize today’s topic in a few words. But I couldn’t. It’s the longest topic title so far. It’s replacing the sugar usually called for in recipes with blended fruit or low glycemic sweeteners. So that’s what we’re going to talk about today. A: It’s one of my favorite topics. Q: So let me pull up the questions that have come in. We have a lot. Before we jump into them, I just want to do a quick recap. So Elaina is mostly into raw foods. Maybe I should let you speak for yourself. And tell people what your experience is with baking for your kids. And then the kinds of foods you mostly make so people can understand today’s topic in context. A: Basically, my experience stems back at least 25 years. I’ve been making gluten-free cooked and raw vegan foods. I started out with cooked organic gluten-free foods. And learned how to make a lot of things with other kinds of flours. Early on I got off of gluten because of health reasons. I noticed I felt better when I wasn’t eating foods that had gluten. Then cutting out the white sugar and replacing it with fruits, maple syrup, honeys, and whole foods sweeteners. I did a lot of baking. Then about 13 years ago, I got into raw vegan foods. So started replacing all the cooked things with things like dates and nuts and lower sweet items as well. Figuring out substituting things. Talking about fruits for sugars and all the different things. My first recipe book was actually this cookbook that I found. I said: well, if I’m going to be vegetarian. I better get a cookbook. I found this book. And it was all about using sweet potatoes in place of grains even. And sugars and whatnot. 1 I’ve had a lot of fun experimenting over the years. I really consider myself an expert more in the raw food recipes. As you said, I still have kids in my life. We are always creating different recipes. I feel like I have a good expertise in the wide range of experiences and knowledge when it comes to making these kinds of foods. Q: I think about. If I had to guess, I’d say at least 80% of our students are primarily cooked food folks. So lets make sure that we talk about using. It’s easy to use low GI sweeteners like Xylitol in place of sugar in baked goods. Because it’s dry powder just like sugar. But I think that is what most fascinating to me and some of our students is how can we replace sugar in baked goods with blended fruit purees or applesauce. Do you want to give us kind of a quick summary of how that’s possible. You can replace sugar with fruit purees or mashed bananas or applesauce. A: It’s the thing you will want to think about when you’re replacing. You want to get the concept down. When I teach people, I kind of like them to have the concept in their minds. Once you have the concept, you can figure out a lot more stuff on your own. Think about a banana bread. When you’re making banana bread. You’re actually using a lot of bananas for the foundation of the bread as well as the sweetness of the bread. You will see that kind of bread doesn’t call for a whole lot of extra sweetener. The reason for that is when you cook something down like a fruit. A banana, an apple, a peach. What happens is you’re cooking all the water out and you’re leaving behind the gumminess of the fruit. Like when you make it into a jam how it gets gummy. You’re leaving behind the sugars. So anything you’re making. It’s going to take a little longer to cook. Or you’re going to have to take out some of the water out of the recipe if you’re substituting. Let’s say you’re taking a mainstream item and trying to switch it over. You’re going to have to take out a little bit of water and add the fruit. Now white sugar is going to be sweeter than the apple. So there’s rules of thumb with this. It’s just kind of guidelines because every fruit is different. We can just say like a green apple would have a way different sweetness than a red delicious apple. Some bananas, depending on their ripeness, are going to be way sweeter than others. Any kind of fruit you get. Depending on whether it’s in season or not. It’s always going to be up to the chef to decide do you need a little more sweetener. It’s guidelines and rules of thumb. Especially when you’re dealing with fruits. It’s not hard fast rules. What I kind of use as a rule of thumb with this. If I’m replacing. Let’s just say apples as an example. I’ve got a recipe like a sweet bread like zucchini bread. Usually you add sugar to that to make it taste sweet even though it’s like banana bread. If using apples or applesauce in place of the actual sweetener. It would be like double the amount of fruit to the amount of sugar. Two cups of pureed apples versus one cup of sugar. And then you also want to cut back on the water. 2 Q: So if it calls for one cup of sugar. You would replace that with at least two cups of pureed apples. And you would also reduce the amount of water or whatever other liquid is in the recipe. A: Right. Like as you were saying. Some people are doing cooked foods anyway. So they’re going to buy applesauce versus whole fresh apples. Applesauce is going to be a little bit more sweet because it’s already been cooked. Than fresh apples. Most people are going to use applesauce than fresh apples. Does that make sense. Do you want me to clarify that? Q: Obviously folks into raw foods are also into whole foods. Which is why Elaina is saying if you’re a raw foods person. You’re not going to put something like applesauce that’s already been cooked and processed. The apples you take fresh and put in a blender or vita mix food processor will be closer to the original whole food. Plus there will still be some Vitamin C in there. Where I doubt there’s any in applesauce cause it’s such a heat sensitive. A: I really doubt it. Yeah. Think about it. If you’re buying applesauce. One, you’re probably paying more money. And two, it’s been sitting in a clear glass jar in a grocery store with the UV lights shining on it. So all the nutrients that are in there are getting exposed to light constantly. So you’re really not dealing with such a high quality. And sometimes the apples that get made into applesauce are not the best apples. They’re the ones with bruises and the ones that nobody else wants. Of course it’s been pasteurized to kill any bacteria. But how good quality are they really? You might be better off. I’ve always just made my own applesauce. Pureeing it, putting a little cinnamon in. It’s fresh applesauce and that’s so much more delicious even if you’re not into all raw foods. It’s a great substitute. You’re going to notice more vibrancy from your food. Q: More vibrancy. Let’s cut to the questions here. We have a lot today. The first one is from Ann Marie. She says: Dr. David Servan-Schreiber in his book, Anticancer: a New Way of Life, suggests agave as a sugar replacement because of its lower glycemic index. Now I want to let you know, Elaina, that we just had a whole bunch of new students enroll starting last Wednesday. So they haven’t seen or read our previous lessons. A: Well, this is good. Because we need to educate everybody. This is perfect. This is a great question as a first question leading into talking about sugar. Do you want me to go ahead and talk about it. Or do you want to say something first? Q: Before you do. Since she’s bring up questions about a few sweeteners, let me just finish her question. So this particular author recommends agave as many of us did 5-10 years ago when we didn’t know about its danger.