When I was working on reviewing Heidi Swanson’s Super Natural Cooking, one of the things I looked forward to was trying out some of the natural, non-super-processed sweeteners out there. After all, they often have slightly lower glycemic indexes (in the case of one or two, much lower!) and this is great news for us sugar addicts who are at risk of diabetes due to family history and bad eating habits (particularly those of us who can’t stand artificial sweeteners).

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However, brown rice syrup is something I was rather dubious about. It doesn’t sound very good, does it? Before using it in anything I gave it a tentative taste, wanting to make sure I didn’t accidentally ruin a recipe by putting in a sweetener that would make it taste bad.

So I took that tiny taste. And then I held the spoon out to my husband and said, “oh my god, you have to try this!”

It doesn’t taste like sugar; I’ll be honest about that. It tastes far better than sugar. It tastes of honey and caramel. It’s the kind of deep, rich taste you can lose yourself in.

One of my favorite kinds of desserts involves fruit, often macerated in a bit of sugar and perhaps a little liqueur. Brown rice syrup, I’ve found, works particularly well for this. I worried it wouldn’t mix in well since it’s quite thick, but just let the spoonful of it sit in the bowl of fruit for a few minutes before stirring; the fruit juices “melt” it quickly and naturally. There’s something about the rich flavor of brown rice syrup that seems to complement berries perfectly. It makes them taste sweeter rather than sweetened, if that makes sense. Take the cherries I used it on last night, for example. They didn’t taste sugared afterward; they just tasted like they’d never been sour at all, and they had a delicious smoky caramel hint to them.

If this is natural cooking, I’ll throw that super-processed white sugar in the trash right now!

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 10th, 2007 at 9:17 am and is filed under Cooking, Health. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.