Salt and Sugar in Baking

Most cookbooks and professional bakers seem to insist on adding a pinch of salt (sometimes quite a big pinch too) to all their sweet bakes, justifying it either by the fact that salt brings out the flavours or that it balances out the sweetness.

I cannot say how true these facts are, as I am not a food scientist, nor a professional baker, but I do know that we already consume more salt and sugar than we need, and I see absolutely no point in using salt where you can do without it. I never use salt in baking desserts and I've never had a problem with either taste or flavour balance.

What do you think?

I also wanted to make a point about the amount of sugar in dessert recipes - it is waaay too much. If you follow most recipes for sweet bakes you'll end up with sickly sweet desserts. The saddest thing is that most of the time we don't even notice it as our palates are so accustomed to huge amounts of sugar in everything we eat.

Sometimes the amount of sugar is justified, like, for example, in classic choc chip cookies where the flour to sugar ratio is important to achieve the chewy texture, but that is quite disappointing for me as even though I am a big fan of chewy cookies, I just cannot eat them any more as I find them overly sweet (over the years I have been cutting down on sugar in my diet and now my sensitivity to sugar has increased and I cannot eat commercial baked goods any more).

My rule of thumb for baking is to use the amount of sugar equal to 1/3 - 1/2 the amount of flour in the recipe. For example if the recipe uses 200g flour, the maximum amount of sugar to use would be 100g - it usually gives a pretty good result, but if the recipe contains raisins/dried fruit/jam/sweet fruit or berries/fruit juice which add sweetness, the amount of sugar should be further reduced.

Also keep in mind that the best kind of sugar is the one that is less refined and less processed and therefore retains more of its natural nutrients, so give preference to unrefined sugar like, demerara, muscovado sugar, and I also heard that coconut sugar is preferable to processed white sugar as it is less processed.

You might have heard that brown sugar is the one to go for, but in fact most kinds of brown sugar (light brown sugar and dark brown sugar) are just refined white sugar with some molasses (treacle) added to it, so there is not much point in paying more for them, you could make them yourself by adding some molasses to your sugar, but what's the point? While molasses has some nutritional value, processed sugar doesn't. 

I am also toying with the idea of substituting sugar completely with products like molasses/maple syrup/honey/date syrup - they are all less sweet than sugar and have some nutritional value, but I will need to experiment, verify the ratios, work on the texture issues, etc. before I can recommend this approach. 

I am not a fan of artificial sweeteners and I am even suspicious of using natural ones like stevia, but I got interested in a story of Carolyn Hartz, the founder of Sweetlife Australia, who swears by xylitol (wood sugar), which she promotes as a perfect and a healthy substitute for sugar and an ideal sugar replacement in baking. I haven't tried it myself yet and I will have to do more research before I can recommend it or not, but you can check out SweetLife Australia website to learn more about it.