What’s your favorite childhood candy? That was the topic of discussion one afternoon in the SAVEUR test kitchen. People brought up the usual York patties and Junior Mints, and then I asked, “Have you ever had Horehounds before?”

“Whore what?” Suddenly I was getting a lot of bewildered looks and slack jaws. I backpedalled, quickly, explaining that Horehounds, no “w,” are a beloved hard candy from my childhood back in Missouri. I then tried to describe their unique and, for me, uniquely compelling flavor. The best I could muster without any candies nearby for inspiration: slightly bitter, slightly sweet, root beer-like flavor. For the rest of the day I couldn’t keep Horehounds off my mind. The following day, my fond reminiscing blossomed into a full-blown craving for this candy. In fact, it was so bad that I had to rush-order a 1-pound bag.

My first taste of these candies came during a camping trip along the Current River in Southern Missouri. I remember my dad showing my sister and me this unfamiliar package while we stopped for gas outside of Rolla, Missouri. He told my sister and me that it was a very special candy, and he couldn’t believe he had stumbled upon them here. My dad remembered eating them as child after his Grandfather brought them on their own camping trips. So, in a moment of nostalgia, he decided to do the same for us.

He tore open the bag and handed us this dark brown and sugar-flecked lump that looked nothing like the candy we were used to seeing. Much to our surprise, we were hooked from the second it hit our tongues. My sister and I couldn’t get enough. From that summer on, Horehound candies became a must-have for every camping trip, and my love for this wonderful and uniquely flavored candy was solidified.

Horehound candies get their distinctive flavor and bitterness from their namesake herb, a bitter flowering plant in the mint family. Native to Europe, Asia, and North Africa, it has been used for millennia as a treatment for lots of ailments—you can find mentions of it in ancient Roman texts from the 1st century B.C. It continues to appear after that in other works about herbal remedies, and has been prescribed to soothe everything from sore throats to digestive woes. It’s said to rid the body of intestinal parasites and calm inflammation, and was even used to treat serious illnesses like tuberculosis and typhoid. Its leaves, stems, and flowers are used, often dried, for medicinal purposes.

Horehound is most commonly found in its dried form, which you can steep and drink as a tea, or as a lozenge. It is still regarded as one of the finest cough and congestion suppressants around (it’s even one of the main ingredients in the cough drop Ricola). This remarkable herb could very well be the original cure-all.

But growing up, my family never used the Horehound candies for their medicinal prowess. They were more of a special treat that my dad always stashed somewhere in his truck for special occasions. To this day, the mere mention of Horehound candies around my family puts a smile on our faces.

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Brown sugar was for cookies. The white granulated stuff went on Cheerios, where it piled like a snow drift, and confectioners sugar was for the French toast my dad cut in strips on weekends.

This was the long and short of sugar for me. But not anymore. Because sugar is the foodstuff that, more than any other, reflects resilience, ingenuity, and creativity in humankind. The body demands it. We go to incredible (and horrific) lengths to obtain it. And it comes in more forms than you’d ever think possible.

The sweet highs and bitter lows of the ingredient that rules the world

Sugarcane, the crop responsible for 80% of the world’s sugar, is a perennial grass that grows in tropical and subtropical regions. In colder climes, sugar is derived from sugar beets, taproots with high concentrations of sucrose. And corn, the building block of perhaps the most maligned syrup the world has ever seen. But it can also be produced by tapping trees, from northern maples to equatorial palms.

It’s all just sucrose, but digging into the world of sugar reveals a doctoral program’s worth of biochemistry, human physiology, and global anthropology. Beyond the crops from which we refine it, how we refine that sugar and what we wind up doing with it speaks volumes about who we and our cultures are. If you want to understand the inventiveness and resilience of a cuisine, look to its sweeteners. Here is a beginner’s guide to help you do so.

Raw Granulated Sugars

All sugar is cooked and processed to some degree—the sweet sap or juice has to be reduced down into a concentrate or crystalline sludge. White sugar then goes a few extra steps, mainly a spin through a centrifuge to extract the brown molasses, leaving you with more or less white sugar that’s then further processed until pristine.

But raw granulated sugars are not refined after the reduction stage. These non-centrifugal cane sugars (NCS), also known as evaporated cane juice, are made by evaporating water out of sugarcane juice, and leave the natural molasses intact, which includes the nutrients, minerals, and deeper flavors of the original cane. Call it field to packet.

Muscovado

Big-brand brown sugar is refined white sugar with molasses added back in. For muscovado, they never take it out in the first place. Muscovado is darker than dark brown sugar with a moist, sandy texture. It’s also known as Barbados sugar, where it was once made in abundance and traded internationally to refineries in Europe. But today, Mauritius and the Philippines are the biggest producers of muscovado. Because of its deep color, bold flavor, and solubility, it works well as a sweetener in barbecue sauce and pairs nicely with gingerbread and spice cookies.

Demerara Sugar

Demerara sugar is named after a historic region in Guyana, where the sugar was first produced in large quantities. To make it, producers reduce fresh sugarcane juice into a thick syrup and eventually a thick sludge, yielding a coarse, crystalline, golden brown sugar. Demerara is often used for its crunch on top of baked goods, but is also used to sweeten coffee and tea due to its nuanced molasses notes, usually less intense than muscovado.

Turbinado

Similar to brown sugar in taste and color (but with less twang), this is the stuff in those ubiquitous brown packets. It’s made from the first pressing of sugarcane and retains some natural molasses, giving it a subtle brown hue, but it has a lighter, more caramel-like flavor than muscovado or demerara and coarser texture, perfect for sprinkling atop baked goods for a sweet crunch.

Brick Sugars

Panela

Panela is unrefined whole cane sugar, boiled cane juice poured into molds shaped like little pylons, hence its other name: piloncillo. Like brown sugar, this Central and South American sweetener often comes in lighter (blanco) and darker (oscuro) versions. And the concept of raw brick cane sugar goes by many names around the world. It’s called rapadura in Brazil, dulce in Costa Rica, uluru dust in Australia, and kukuto in Japan.

Over in South America, Peruvians add it to a sweet sauce called chancaca that’s drizzled over picarones (Peruvian donuts). In Chile it’s used to make a sweet pastry called sopaipilla, and in Costa Rica, piloncillo is shaved and added to hot water for a sweet drink called agua dulce. (Folks in Yunnan Province, China do something similar with their brick sugar as a quasi-medicinal drink to raise blood sugar.)

Jaggery

Essentially the panela of India, jaggery is mostly made from cane, but some varieties are the reduced sap of date, coconut, and sago palms. No matter the source, the crop is harvested and pressed for its juice, which is then placed in large vats to allow sediment to collect on the bottom. It is then strained from the sediment, placed in large-diameter, shallow pans, and boiled to form a thick, doughy mass.

This paste, which retains all of its natural molasses and the nutrients therein, is then placed in molds and allowed to cool and dry. In India, jaggery (which is also called gur) extends into medicinal and religious practices, and jaggery-based sweets are often presented to the gods as offerings.

Palm Sugar

In Southeast Asia, sugar-producing palm trees grew long before cane, and palm sugars rule the sweet teeth of Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and beyond. The final product’s color and flavor varies depending on the tree and climate in which it’s harvested. The names also vary; Malaysian coconut sugar is gula Melaka; over in Indonesia, palm sugar is called gula jawa.

To make palm sugar, sap is first collected from the inflorescence (flower stalks) of the palm. From there it is boiled down into a syrup and can be sold as-is or whipped and poured into different molds of varying shapes and sizes, including bamboo and coconut shells, where it is allowed to cool and harden.

The sugar ranges from light and golden to black and smoky, and are used in all kinds of desserts, particularly those with coconut, pandan, and sticky rice. Palm sugar is also far less sweet than table sugar, which makes it a handy ingredient for savory dishes from the region.

Molasses and Liquid Sugars

Molasses

Molasses is a byproduct of the sugar refining process, and can be made from sugarcane and sugar beets. To produce it, cane or beets are crushed, the juice is boiled down, and sugar crystals are removed. The remaining unctuous tar is molasses.

Variations of molasses include light, dark, and blackstrap—produced from the first, second, and third boiling (respectively) of cane. Light molasses, the most commonly sold, is the sweetest and mildest in flavor. Dark molasses is a concentrated version of light, in that it’s slightly darker, more bitter, and less sweet. Blackstrap molasses, made from the third and final boiling of molasses, is the thickest and darkest of the three. It’s also the least sweet, which makes it best for savory dishes like baked beans and barbecue sauce. Sulfured and un-sulfured are further molasses distinctions, referring to the addition (or not) of sulfur dioxide, which is added as a preservative.

Treacle

Effectively the British version of molasses. Black treacle is comparable to blackstrap, while golden treacle is a thick, caramelly sugar syrup. Both make their way into a bevy of British tarts and gingerbreads.

Cane Syrup

Similar to molasses but more primal, cane syrup is made by boiling cane juice down but not extracting sugar crystals. It’s sweeter and less intense than molasses, with a deep golden verve like British golden treacle. A must on pancakes in parts of the American South.

Sorghum

Sorghum grass thrives in hot climates, and most of the high-sugar sorghum plants in the grass family Poaceae are native to Australia and West Africa. But it’s also popular in the American South, where its grassy, tangy flavor is put to work drizzled over biscuits or stirred into grits.

Fruit Molasses

Fruit molasses is produced in a similar fashion to maple syrup, and the most common fruits used to make fruit molasses are pomegranate, date, and grape. These fruits are juiced and the juice is boiled down to create a concentrate. Sugar is sometimes added to bolster the yield and make a sweet product, and these syrups can be drizzled over ice cream, used in salad dressings, and mixed into cocktails.

Fruit molasses originates in regions where access to sugar was prohibitive due to price or climate, and it is prized as a far healthier sugar alternative high in antioxidants and minerals.

Nectar

Agave nectar is the most commercially sold plant nectar, but other nectar plants include Black-Eyed Susan, Marigold, Petunia, Sunflower, and Violet. Plant nectars like agave are made mechanically, whereby the leaves are manually cut off and the juice is harvested. It is then filtered and heated so it concentrates into a dense liquid. The nectars retain less of their origin plants’ flavors than cane syrup or honey varietals, and come in a range of intensities depending on the amount of refinement.

Honey

Honey is the purest form of sugar found in nature, and the most natural form of sugar on this list. It starts as flower nectar, which is collected by certain social hymenopterans, or winged insects. Once those bees and other insects collect the nectar, their bodies break it down into simple sugars, then deposit that syrup in honeycomb.

The comb’s unique structure, coupled with the constant fanning of the insects’ wings, evaporates off moisture until the honey’s water content is a mere 20%. There are over 300 distinct types of honey, with varying hues, consistencies, and flavors based on the type of flowers from which the nectar is harvested. Since honey contains a high proportion of fructose, it’s sweeter than table sugar, pound for pound.

Maple Syrup

The sap from maple trees—namely sugar, red, and black maples—produces both maple syrup and maple sugar. The former is made through a process of boiling maple tree sap to evaporate liquids and leave behind a dense concentration of sugary sap; the latter is reduced further into a moist, crystalline substance like muscovado.

Birch Sugar

Trees are tapped in late winter and early spring, after starches have converted to sugars that then run throughout the tree via sap. Though maple trees are the most commonly tapped trees for syrup, they’re far from the only ones that produced sap. Black birch is commonly used for birch syrup (and birch beer), and walnut trees yield a syrup with a delicately nutty flavor.

Grain Syrups

Sugars live in starch as well, but starches are not soluble in water and, in order to be digested, must be catalyzed by enzymes called amylases. Humans have amylases in our saliva, which explains why chewing foods high in starch often take on a sweet taste before the food is swallowed—the enzymes convert starch to sugar as we chew.

The process can also be done mechanically, to produce sweeteners, or syrups, from starch. In the case of rice or barley, the starches are converted to sugar with amylase. This process yields a sweet liquid that is then strained off and heated to allow evaporation to a prefered consistency and sweetness. RIce syrup is often used as a sweetener in rice milk and other beverages.

Refined Sugars

White Sugar

The ubiquitous sweetener most people think of when they think of sugar, made from sugarcane or sugar beets that goes through a double-crystallization process to remove all the molasses and minerals. It’s also the end result of centuries of sugar obsessions and, as some put it, the instigator of the greatest health crises the Western world has ever seen.

Under the white sugar umbrella you’ll find caster (or superfine) sugar, which is granulated sugar that is milled more and further refined to produce a finer crystal. This sugar melts quicker, though it lacks the ability to incorporate air into baked goods as the bigger, coarser crystals of white sugar do. Confectioners’ sugar uses the same superfine base, but is cut with cornstarch to prevent clumping.

Pearl and Sanding Sugar

Decorating sugars are used at the end of the baking or cooking process to add sweetness and color.

Pearl sugar, a.k.a. nib sugar and hail sugar, consists of large opaque flakes and is available in an array of colors. Sanding sugar is similar to pearl sugar, though it is translucent and has a brighter, more pronounced shimmer. Decorating sugars have a high melting point, so they keep their form even after baking. Find them sprinkled over Scandinavian pastries, German Christmas cookies, Belgian Liege waffles, and French chouquettes.

Caramel

Salted Caramel Sauce

Caramel is a category all its own, the result of sugar molecules decomposing under extreme heat into hundreds of aromatic compounds. The higher you heat a caramel, the bolder, more savory, and less sweet the result will taste.

Rock Sugar

There’s a bit of science behind every kid’s favorite tooth-cracking candy. Rock sugar, or rock candy, is formed with a solution of sugar and water through a process called nucleation, whereby the sweet sugary solution forms large sugar crystals as it cools and adheres to a suitable surface. You’re supposed to treat rock candy like a lollipop, and let it dissolve. But kids and patience rarely go together.

Rock candy originated in India and Persia and is used to sweeten tea, as is tradition in Iran, where the sweet drink is called nabat. The candy is also used in the Netherlands, where it’s baked into bread, and in China it’s used to sweeten grain-fermented baijiu and in the slow-braise technique known as red cooking.

The post The Complete Guide to Sugar Around the World appeared first on Saveur.

For Coconut Rob, sugarcane isn’t just the raw material for sugar—it’s the water of life. The itinerant fruit hawker and juice presser has long been a fixture of Fort Greene, Brooklyn, where he serves a dash of Caribbean cuisine, style, and medicine to the local community. The cuisine in question is perfect tropical produce, including his namesake coconuts, as well as smoothies of all kinds, and, perhaps most excitingly, freshly squeezed sugarcane juice. Never had the stuff? There’s no other way to describe the uniquely grassy, nutty, and golden liquid than grin-inducingly delicious. And if you listen to Rob, he’ll quickly tell you why he recommends it for your health.

You’d be justified to be skeptical of the nutritional benefits of a sugary juice devoid of its plant’ valuable fiber. But in the Caribbean, including Rob’s native Trinidad and Tobago, freshly squeezed cane has long blurred the borders between food and medicine. Rob says the sweet stuff will whiten your teeth, help you grow strong, and ensure a safe pregnancy. We’ll just say his fresh elixir is indeed wonderful, a rare tropical delight in grey, blustery New York, and sipping it is good for the soul.

Beyond selling fresh fruit and juices on the street, Rob also caters parties and events, where his natural great-host tendencies get a chance to shine. In the video above, reporter Dan Pleck captures Rob at work at a nighttime party, where sugarcane is a crucial ingredient in a fun night for everyone.

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Croquembouche: it’s French for giant sweet marvel of architecture. Okay, it’s not, but it is an architectural marvel, and it is a giant sweet wonderful thing. Which is why when pastry chef Tyler Atwell of New York’s Lafayette Grand Cafe & Bakery offered to make one in our test kitchen, we couldn’t say yes fast enough.

A croquembouche is conical tower made of cream puffs that are bonded together with caramel syrup. For Atwell, prepping the ‘bouche takes a whopping six hours, with three solid hours of construction time. Each puff is hand-filled with one of three flavors of pastry cream (vanilla, chocolate, or butterscotch), and once assembled the tower is wrapped with a delicate feather boa made of spun sugar. (Pro tip: dip an espresso wand in molten candy, then spin it against a cylindrical drum for instant cotton candy.)

If you want to make your own croquembouche, we’re here for you. That recipe is scaled down for closer to 16 cream puffs than the 400 that Atwell bakes. Because we can’t all be heroes all the time.

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Gary Taubes is not a fan of sugar. In his latest book, The Case Against Sugar, he argues that the food most of us eat daily and consider a benign pleasure is the primary risk factor of modern chronic diseases such as obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. In the author’s note, he states, “If this were a criminal case, The Case Against Sugar would be the argument for the prosecution.” With thoroughly researched historical evidence and a wealth of scientific data, he makes a compelling case. I reached out to Taubes to get the inside story on why sugar is out to get us.

We’ve spent two months doing something called The Sugar Files, which was mostly in praise of sugar.
In praise of sugar?

Yes, but I didn’t praise it. I kicked it off with a depressing history of sugar, and my last contribution is talking to you about sugar and how it affects our lives and our health. It’s often compared to drugs—do you think sugar is an addictive drug?
It’s certainly not for everyone. Just as some people can drink in moderation, other people can’t. And some people can smoke in moderation, and other people can’t. I was someone who couldn’t. I think clearly some people find it easier to consume no sugar at all, no added sugar, than to try to consume it in moderation. And because I’m one of those people, I guess I think everyone should experiment with no sugar and see how they feel. I got an email from a guy today who said he’d given up sugar now for months and he’s still having what he considers to be a post-sugar rush. I’m probably going to steal that.

But there was that study with lab rats where they chose sugar water over cocaine and heroin.
Yeah but those are lab rats. Is it addictive to us? If you have children I don’t think you need carefully done scientific research to tell you that this substance has some unique effect that no other substances do. But is it classically addictive? This is how it differs from other drugs.

With sugar, it’s sort of out of sight out of mind. If you don’t see it, if you’re not around it, you’re not likely to crave it. Whereas with cigarettes, and I assume this is certainly true of heroin and cocaine and alcohol for alcoholics, if you make the attempt to give it up, your brain is definitely crying out from dysfunction. While quitting smoking there’s a three-week period where your brain doesn’t function right without nicotine doing whatever it does to the nerve endings, and clearly it’s the same case for other addictive drugs. I’ve had people tell me that they go through cravings like that when giving up sugar, but they seem to be rare. Whereas I think for most of us, if it’s not around, you don’t really think about it. And even with my children, if it’s not around, they really don’t think about it. It’s only when they’re confronted with it that they go ahead and eat it.

Most people don’t realize or think about how prevalent sugar is in their daily lives, but it’s everywhere. How did it become so prevalent?
That’s why the first chapter is called Drug or Food? As you see sugar saturate diets, and it does, populations will consume as much sugar as they can afford, up to or even beyond the point where they become obese and diabetic. The question is does that happen because it’s an inexpensive, useful nutrient that also happens to taste so good, or does it happen because it’s a drug? It clearly has psychoactive properties, and it clearly influences that part of our brain that other drugs of abuse do, the reward center of our brain.

We forget that just 200 years ago, our average weekly sugar intake would have been the equivalent of the amount of sugar in a 12-ounce can of Coca-Cola. A number of the foods that are now the standard purveyors of sugar in our diets didn’t exist. Soft drinks didn’t exist, candy didn’t exist, chocolate bars didn’t exist. Ice cream was such an unbelievable luxury that if anybody had it, it would be written up in the newspaper.

All of this is the product of the industrial revolution. It all begins from 1840 onward, and it goes as long as sugar prices plummeted both because of endless improvements in harvesting and refining sugar, and the founding of the beet sugar and high fructose corn syrup industries.

Sugar used to be something that your system would have to deal with once a week. Pre-agriculture, you would get significant sugar from eating fruit seasonally, say one or two months a year. By the 1960s I think most Americans wouldn’t go three hours without a sugar dose. It’s that daily dosing of sugar that our bodies can’t cope with, and the result is obesity and diabetes. Not just because of the calories in that sugar, but because of the harmful effects of those calories. They’re not empty calories, they’re harmful calories.

Sugar is in virtually every processed food. In American white bread, up to 12 percent of the calories are from sugar, whereas in European white bread it’s closer to 2 percent. I found that interesting because I’m often asked, “Well if you think bread is so fattening, how do you explain French women eating it a bunch?” Part of it is that I think French women of a certain age don’t eat a lot of bread because they’re aware that it’s fattening. But their bread also has a much lower sugar content.

The last chapter of your book is called “How Little is Too Much?” But there isn’t a definitive answer to that question. Do you think the best thing to do is completely avoid sugar?
There are two issues here. One is if you make the decision, which not everyone does, to eat the healthiest possible diet, can that diet contain some sugar, however we define ‘some?’ The answer probably very much differs by your health status. If you’re predisposed to obesity and/or diabetes, or you’re already obese or diabetic, I would argue that you’re probably healthier with a diet that would not include sugar. If you’re a 20-year-old marathoner and your parents lived to be 95 and are healthy, then go for it.

But I would still say you could do an enormous amount of good by avoiding sugary beverages, sweets, pastries, ice creams, all the things you feel guilty eating and drinking. You obviously feel guilty for a reason. You know they’re not good for you.

All the things that people consider treats.
I was a smoker. When you’re a cigarette smoker, you can’t imagine deriving pleasure from your life without cigarettes. Cigarettes completely saturate your day, just like sweets have, in the sense that you wake up looking forward to your first cup of coffee and your first cigarette, then you walk to work and smoke a cigarette, then you get to work and you’re looking forward to your next cigarette. You have cigarettes after sex, you have cigarettes when you’re angry, you have cigarettes when you’re happy. They just modulate every emotional experience.

When you quit, the first three weeks you feel overwhelmed by cravings, it’s a constant struggle. You get past the first three weeks and the first three months and you’re just kind of angry and depressed and unhappy. In the first year you’re generally unhappy and there’s no real source of joy in life. Then by year two and three, you get to the point where you can’t imagine you ever smoked. The idea that at some point in my life I needed cigarettes to be happy is almost incomprehensible to me now, and I think the same thing is true of sugar.

It seems like there’s so much evidence, and very clear evidence, against sugar. How does the industry get around that and deny that it’s bad for us?
Up until recently our dominant dietary philosophy and public health policy was to get Americans to eat a low-fat diet. The way the food industry did that was to remove the fat from products and replace it with sugar or high fructose corn syrup and advertise them as health foods. So all the sugar industry had to do was let the nutrition and public health communities pursue their anti-fat campaign. It was good for sugar because sugar was something you could put in low-fat foods to make them taste good.

The other thing was “a calorie is a calorie according to our nutrition and obesity experts.” All the industry had to do was say “there’s no such thing as a fattening or fat-reducing food. A calorie is a calorie.” With that logic sugar is benign; it’s no more likely to cause obesity or diabetes than quinoa or kale. The key, they’d say, is not to eat it in excess.

Sugar is always at the scene of the crime in populations whenever dietary epidemics happen. The problem is you could make an argument that sugar has the gun necessary to commit the crime, but what you can’t do is find the smoking gun. You don’t have definitive evidence. If your standard of evidence is innocent until proven guilty, then I say, and I make this argument in the prologue, that we should rethink our relationship with sugar until somebody bothers to prove it innocent, if such a thing can be done. And arguably, that’s virtually impossible also.

Is it actually impossible to prove it guilty?
If you wanted to really demonstrate that sugar was the cause of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease, you’d want to do extensive studies. We did these studies with dietary fat and they didn’t support the idea that dietary fat was the cause of heart disease. You’d want to take, say, 50,000 Americans, and 25,000 of them go on the Mediterranean diet with sugar and 25,000 of them go on it without sugar. You need to give them advice on how to do the diet, and then you’ve got to follow them for long enough that you would expect a significant number to get obese or lean, or to get diabetic, or for a significant amount of heart attacks to manifest themselves.

Since both groups are now eating healthy diets, or certainly healthier than they used to be eating, you might have to keep them on the diet for 10 years, which is excruciatingly hard to do because during those 10 years, they might end up reading articles about sugar being bad for you. So those on the diet with sugar might stop eating sugar. But let’s say you can keep everyone on their diets, and then at the end of 10 years you can see whether everyone on the diet without sugar is healthier than everyone on the diet with it. That’s how you’d definitively do it.

You could do other studies shorter term, what are called better-controlled studies, where you really watch what the people are eating so they don’t have a choice but to eat exactly what you’re giving them and exactly how much you’re giving them. You could swap out the calories of sugar from one diet with calories from something else in another diet, and you could probably demonstrate that sugar causes a lot of the symptoms of insulin resistance including fat accumulation in the liver, but you wouldn’t be able to demonstrate that people didn’t adjust to it with time.

This wouldn’t demonstrate that they actually get heart disease and diabetes or obesity from eating sugar; it would just demonstrate that you could just give them the risk factors, increase the risk of getting heart disease and diabetes over the course of, say, three months, which is about the longest you can do those studies.

It’s really hard to do, but if people thought it through, and if the government made a concerted effort, you could probably do all of this for a billion dollars. That’s about a day’s worth of costs to the healthcare system due to these diet-related illnesses. It’s hard to argue it’s not worth it.

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For Margaret Braun, sugar isn’t just a food—it’s an artistic medium like porcelain. Which is why she’s just at home decorating elaborate cakes for a royal wedding—and writing about it all in her book, Cakewalk—as she is designing 2,000 cups for the Museum of Art and Design, made completely out of the sweet stuff. Her aesthetic takes late Renaissance and Rococo style and brings it on a journey to a fantastical novel that we want to live in. Frankly, we’re obsessed.

Here’s Braun’s sugar magic at work. She starts by mixing sugar with gum tragacanth into a gum-paste-like substance called pastillage, which is pliable to work with but sets firm like clay. She molds, twirls, and pipes her sugar paste into place, lets it set, then paints it with watercolors. The result? Something that’s structural but also edible, blurring the line between food and art to nilch. Watch the video above to see how she does it, then take a look at some our other favorite geniuses turning sugar into artwork—and vice versa.

The post Artist Margaret Braun Transforms Plain White Sugar Into Fantastical Sculptures appeared first on Saveur.

Synthetic sweeteners seem like a miracle food. They require no land for growing, no smoke-belching refineries, and most of them pass through your body unmetabolized, which is what makes them zero-calorie and safe for diabetics, since they don’t affect blood sugar levels. The perfect food of the future.

If only.

Dig into the backgrounds of the Big Four artificial sweeteners—saccharin, cyclamate, aspartame and sucralose—and you’ll find no shortage of fraught history. There have been questions of safety. Cancer in lab animals. Reports that sugar substitutes actually encourage weight gain. And they don’t taste that good.

But the promise of a calorie-free treat has stronger pull than any of these deterrents, which is why the next big sweetener is always around the corner. The histories of these compounds also reveal the unexpected roads the scientific discovery process takes; the path to sugar-free sweetness takes detours through everything from coal tar to ulcer medication.

Let’s review how we’ve come so far.

In the Beginning, There was Saccharin

Saccharin, named for the Latin word for sugar, was discovered accidentally in 1897 by a Johns Hopkins University researcher who was looking for new uses for coal tar derivatives. He forgot to wash his hands before lunch and tasted something sweet on his fingers. (Similar versions of this story occur in the accidental discoveries of cyclamate, aka Sweet’N Low, and aspartame, too.) After tasting everything in his lab to determine the source, he figured out it was benzoic sulfimide, a coal tar derivative that is 300 times sweeter than sugar. (Fun fact: Monsanto got its start in 1901 selling saccharin.)

By 1907, saccharin was already widely used in sodas and canned goods, but most Americans had no idea it was in their food. As part of a series of sweeping food and drug reforms, Harvey Wiley, the head of the chemical division of the United States Department of Agriculture, recommended banning saccharin for possibly being toxic. The person who got in his way was President Theodore Roosevelt, who was on a weight-loss regimen that included a dose of saccharin prescribed by his doctor.

The sweetener was eventually banned in 1912, but the decision was reversed during World War I, when sugar rations necessitated the use of saccharin as a substitute. Once the war was over, people continued to enjoy the calorie-free sweetener.

Sweet’N Bad for You

The introduction of a sweetener called cyclamate to the American market coincided with the diet soda boom of the 1950s. Cyclamate is what sweetened Tab and Diet Pepsi, and what filled the iconic pink packets of Sweet’N Low. The substance was discovered in 1937 when a University of Illinois grad student working on a fever-reducing drug tasted something sweet on his finger during a smoke break. (Yes, this really is how science works sometimes.)

That was cyclamate, a chemical that’s 30 to 50 times sweeter than sugar. By 1963, cyclamate was America’s favorite artificial sweetener, costing a tenth of the price of sugar and with zero calories. By 1968, Americans were consuming more than 17 million pounds of the stuff each year. That all came to a halt when the sweetener was proven to cause bladder cancer in rats, resulting in an immediate ban by the FDA that’s still in effect. In response, Sweet’N Low swiftly became a saccharin-based product.

A is for Aspartame

It took more than a decade for the next big artificial sweetener to pick up where cyclamate left off. In another accidental discovery, James Schlatter, a research chemist for G.D. Searle and Company, licked his fingers while developing a new ulcer drug in 1965 and, yes, tasted something sweet. That was aspartame, an amino acid compound (a mixture of aspartic acid and phenylalanine) that is 200 times sweeter than sugar.

After a holdup with the FDA in 1974, when approval was paused due to claims that aspartame caused brain tumors, the sweetener finally hit the market as Nutrasweet in 1981. According to the Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets, aspartame replaced more than a billion pounds of sugar in the American diet during the 1980s. (Diet Coke—made with aspartame—was launched during this time.)

Though health complaints and investigations linked to both aspartame and saccharin persisted throughout this period, consumption of diet sodas continued to climb in the ‘80s and ‘90s, eventually plateauing in the aughts.

Along Came Splenda

Sucralose, which was later marketed as Splenda, was created in 1976 when scientists found a way to molecularly bond sucrose molecules with chlorine. (Yes, chlorine.) One researcher was asked to “test” the chlorinated compound, but misheard the request and tasted it instead. The researcher survived, and in so doing paved the way to a product that is about 600 times sweeter than sugar.

Unlike the artificial sweeteners that came before it, sucralose is partially metabolized by the body, which means it does deliver calories. Also unlike the others, it’s heat-stable, which means you can bake with it.

Thus Splenda has replaced NutraSweet as the most widely consumed sugar substitute on the market…for now. The search for the next big artificial sweetener is already on, including a promising compound called neotame. Only time will tell.

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Is it sweet or savory? The magic of kanafeh—a dessert popular across the Middle East—is that it’s both. A base of gooey, stretchy, and slightly salty cheese is topped with generously buttered kataifi (golden shreds of phyllo), spritzed with spiced syrup, and baked until the cheese starts to ooze and the phyllo topping browns into a mass of irresistible crunch. May the pastry gods strike me down for saying so, but it’s a sweet that goes toe to toe with baklava, and as far as I’m concerned, far surpasses it.

Few kanafeh are as magical as the one baked by Wafa Chami, the Lebanese cooking Queen of New York, whose Wafa’s has been an anchor of Forest Hills, Queens, since 2008. What began as a casual sandwich shop morphed into a full-service restaurant between 2010 and 2011, dishing out classics like shawarma, spinach pies, and spreads, but also home-cooking specialties like braised baby okra with mint and moussaka (in Lebanese parlance, a ratatouille-like summery stew of eggplant, tomatoes, and chickpeas). Then of course there was the kanafeh—the cheese base just a bit stretchy but also deeply creamy, lighter and fresher and less syrup-drenched than every other version in New York.

The sweet highs and bitter lows of the ingredient that rules the world

Chami closed her restaurant last year, but just a few weeks ago she and her family started the third act in their business: Wafa’s Express, a casual counter-service place across borough lines in Brooklyn. Most of the original menu is there, including the kanafeh, which is winning over new fans every day.

We sent reporter Yulin Lou to document what makes Chami’s kanafeh so uniquely hers. The kitchen starts with a curd cheese made specially for the restaurant in New Jersey; it then gets mixed with ashta, a thick, luscious substance a lot like clotted cream, and is dosed with both orange blossom and rose water. Then come those delicate strands of kataifi, pulled apart like a nest of pasta, glazed with melted butter, and then anointed with a dash of sugar syrup.

What emerges from the oven is, well, magic. Watch the video above to see how it comes together. And if you want to try your hand at your own, we have you covered with a recipe, too.

Thumbnail image: Alpha

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In 1840, sweetening your tea was a complicated affair. To the cone-shaped loaf of refined sugar you’d bought from your grocer, you’d take a sugar nipper—a pair of sharp-edged cast-iron pincers—to twist off a fist-sized chunk. If you were cooking, you’d then shave it down into powder, but for beverages, it was much easier—if not tidier—to simply dunk the chunk in your drink, let it dissolve to your taste, then fish it out and let dry for the next cup of tea.

In Moravia, then part of the Austrian empire, now the easternmost portion of the Czech Republic, Jakub Kryštof Rad’s wife wasn’t happy with the sticky status quo. After one too many nipper-related injuries, or so the story goes, she put Rad, the Swiss-born director of a beet sugar refinery in Dačice, on the case for a single-serve sugar solution. Rad’s answer, patented in 1843, was the sugar cube.

The sweet highs and bitter lows of the ingredient that rules the world

By grating, wetting, and pressing the loaf sugar into a 400-slot mold, then letting it dry overnight, Rad’s factory was able to turn out perfectly uniform, individually portioned units of sugar. After their resounding success at home, Rad dedicated a corner of his factory’s production floor to his new invention, and with a small staff of women and girls was soon turning out 10 tons of cubes a day, selling them across Europe but primarily to Vienna, whose café culture was hungry for an easier, more hygienic coffee-sweetening option.

This wasn’t the first time sugar’s form had been manipulated for human delight, but it was the most accessible. “Sweet salt,” as it was known during the Crusades, was a novelty brought back to the West from the Holy Land. It had arrived in the Middle East via India, where the first records of sugar refining have been found, dating back to the 5th century CE. Cane cuttings were planted in Venice, which became Europe’s sugar hub until New World explorers discovered the cane-rich Caribbean.

But refining sugar was a long, hot, time-consuming process—even when produced by slave labor —and its results were costly. To show off their status, Renaissance-era aristocrats commissioned grand sugar sculptures called trionfi, mimicking the massive bronzes of historic and mythic figures that were dominating the art world. Later sugar artists would delight in trompe l’oeil designs; at a Venetian banquet given for Henri III of France in the mid-16th century, every piece of the 1,200-piece table setting was made of sugar, including the tablecloth.

The automation of the sugar extraction process in the early 19th century, as it coincided with the industrialization of the production of a great number of consumer goods, created a consumerist middle class with access to an unprecedented amount of stuff. Over the course of 10 years, from 1845-1854, British sugar consumption increased more than 30 times, 90% of which came from Puerto Rico, Cuba, and other Caribbean countries. By 1900, fully 20% of the calories in the average British diet came from sugar.

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The cube made its British debut in 1875, when Henry Tate, a grocer-turned-sugar magnate (and namesake founder of London’s Tate Gallery), bought the patent for a new cube-making process from a German named Eugen Langen. Rather than dealing with rough boulders of sugar, Langen’s process refined the sugar in a centrifuge first, then let it harden into bricks that were sawn into cubes by hand. At that point, refiners across Europe and in the U.S. were racing to come up with the most efficient method of cube-ifying their products; Tate’s was among the most efficient.

But why the cube? With the ability to mold sugar into any shape under the sun, why did everyone settle on such a humdrum form? It’s true that cubes are the ideal shape for industrial production and distribution: modular, stackable, and easily transported. But more importantly, cubes embodied the all-important Victorian values of order and rationality.

Victorian industrialism sought to control the natural world at all costs, and sugar—a gleaming white crystal derived from messy plant matter—was the ultimate proof of that mastery. Sugar marketing of the time highlighted its purity, a delivery method for unadulterated food energy, and the cube was a visual indicator of sugar obeying the laws of science, unlike the hand-hewn cones of loaf sugar or artistically rendered sugar models of the past.

After a steady presence into the mid-20th century fueled by new uses in cocktails and as an early vehicle for the polio vaccine, the sugar cube took a sharp nose dive in the latter half of the century, replaced with paper packets of granulated sugar and myriad sugar substitutes, taking the chemistry-class market to new levels.

But today, we’ve regressed to a curiously pre-industrial state. In any high-end restaurant cocktail service or classically styled cocktail bar, you’ll be presented with uneven lumps of pale brown turbinado or white sugar—never a basic cube.

These new-school lumps look like the jagged results of hard-fought struggles with a pair of sugar nippers, and a Victorian housekeeper would have been horrified at the idea of setting out impure brown sugar for polite company. They’re studiously unrefined in their shape, signaling the things that we now value in our food: nature, authenticity, and the human touch.

The rectilinear sugar cube may be on its way out, but its mission—encapsulating the needs and values of an age in a kernel of sweetness—lives on.

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One evening in Ferrara, Italy in 1529, a grand feast was planned for the wedding of one wealthy Italian nobleman to France’s Princess Renée, daughter of King Louis XII. According to Michael Krondl in Sweet Invention: A History of Dessert, posh Venetians were obsessed with sugar, going so far as to adorn their banquet tables with gleaming white sugar sculptures. The provincial citizens of Ferrara had to step up their game with such ritzy company in town; a sugar showdown was inevitable.

Thus the dinner menu included game birds doused in blancmange, a starch-thickened sauce of cream and sugar, and further topped with, you guessed it, more sugar. Fried bone marrow fritters were dunked in sugar syrup. Eels were baked into marzipan, obviously, and toothy, tube-shaped lampreys were roasted and served in a sauce of their own sweetened blood. If sugar’s value wasn’t already clear, a giant pie was presented for the ninth and final course. Its crust was not filled with sweetened fruit, but heaps of glittering jewelry.

The sweet highs and bitter lows of the ingredient that rules the world

So it was in the time before the dessert course as western Europeans have come to know it. For the longest time in France, Italy, and England, dessert—as a sweet course following a savory meal—didn’t exist. Sweets were around, of course—the smacking allure of sweetness has hung heavy over our heads ever since the earliest humans first stumbled upon a beehive—but there was little order to the procession of a meal. Sugary cakes and pastries as well as candied nuts, fruits, and flowers were all interspersed with meats and vegetables, serving as palate cleansers and digestive aids and fending off “dispelling wind,” as noted by Jacques Savary, one particularly eloquent 17th-century Frenchman.

Sugar itself, though, was expensive, and prized not only as a sweetener but as a seasoning and status symbol. Toward the end of the 15th century in Europe, the price of refined sugar began to reflect its high demand, and its newfound status as a luxury good did exactly what you might expect to rich Europeans anxious to flaunt their wealth: It made them want more.

Sprinkling sugar on your stew, then, was as much as power move as it was a flavor enhancer, transforming the boiled birds and weird roasted sea creatures of the age into things that looked and tasted rich, if not particularly delicious. But like all trends, it wouldn’t last forever.

It was another eloquent 17th-century Frenchman who first remarked on a shift in this trend towards sweetening our savory dishes. In Le Cuisinier François, François Pierre La Varenne essentially declared that aggressively sweetened savory dishes weren’t fancy anymore, and that rich people had to find more interesting ways to make their food taste good. Adding a sugary cream sauce to your partridge was officially passé.

Sugar’s fall in fashion corresponds to economic and cultural changes in the wealthy circles of these European countries at the time. As industrial refinement of sugar expanded, its price—and potency as a status symbol—plummeted. But dessert as a distinct course may owe its birth to something more flighty: salons, those intellectual house parties of the late Renaissance and beyond where folks would gather to drink tea and chat in a setting significantly less formal than a grand dinner feast.

Chefs took the salon as an excuse to prepare more manageable, single-portion sweets to accompany tea and entertain small groups. Executed with ample artistry, these tarts, èclairs, and petit-fours became more and more popular as folks found more avenues to eat decadently without throwing a party, and came to see sweets as an indulgence that could be enjoyed with restraint rather than pomposity. Add to that a developing trend toward service à la russe, or Russian-style service, a style more akin to the modern practice of serving dishes one at a time rather than all at once, and you have a natural progression toward a meal-final dessert dish, in which a small, sweet èclair might make its way to your plate with a cup of tea or coffee.

The word “dessert,” which is the participle of the French desservir, meaning “to clear the table,” was first written in 1539, and referred to the delicate candied fruits and nuts that dinner guests would snack on in the aftermath of a grand meal, such as that of the princess in Ferrara. As fashionable French customs trickled out into the rest of Europe and the savory-sweet divide widened, the word took on all sorts of meanings, likely aligning with trends among scullery maids who would bring out chilled tarts and cakes at the end of a meal for their employers to pick at while they washed the dishes. By the late 1700s, the word was adopted in English, both American and British, and “dessert” ultimately became a course all its own.

These days, I wouldn’t be surprised to find a nouveau blancmange revival hitting a Michelin-starred menu, but maybe they can leave the eels in marzipan back in the 16th-century where they belong.

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In India, there is no occasion too inconsequential for mithai—small, portable, and (often) milk-based sweets. Just had a baby? Graduated from school? Bought a new TV? Recently recovered from a cold? Undoubtedly, mithai will be involved.

Since most Indian restaurants don’t offer robust selections of mithai, the best way to explore the world of these sweets is to go to a dedicated mithai shop. Like Levain in New York or Gjusta in Los Angeles, certain mithai shops in India have cult-like followings across the country. And while cooking in India is intensely regional, mithai—and the Indian sweet tooth for them—are far more universal.

The sweet highs and bitter lows of the ingredient that rules the world

I am lucky enough to have family in India who lives within walking distance of one of the most celebrated sweet shops in the country: Evergreen Sweet House, an ever-bustling storefront in New Delhi where the mithai are so fresh that there is a guy frying glistening pieces of jalebi (like a syrupy funnel cake) to order right outside the shop at all hours of the day.

If you’re fortunate to find yourself at Evergreen, or any of the excellent mithai shops here in the U.S. (My personal favorite is Raja Sweets in Houston), you’re going to want to know your rasmalai from your rasgulla. So, I present here your introductory mithai cheat sheet, which is by no means exhaustive and certainly biased towards my favorite varieties. Let it help to steer you toward the treat that is right for you, whether it’s a silver-coated diamond of kaju katli or a ghee-laden sphere of laddu.

Burfi

Burfi is the most basic variety of mithai—a blank canvas of condensed milk and sugar molded into countless variations. Burfi is usually decorative, and will come in interesting shapes and colors, often finished with a tissue-paper-thin sheet of silver (totally edible, in case you were wondering).

Other versions will incorporate almonds, carrots, pistachios, coconut, and even milk chocolate—but they’ll almost always be finished with a hint of rosewater, a fragrant, delicate flavor that nicely balances out the richness of the burfi.

Kaju Katli

Though it’s technically just a type of burfi, kaju katli is so popular and so delicious that it deserves a description of its own. The dominant ingredient is ground cashews, which make kaju katli taste less like a milk ball and more like a solidified nut butter—if you’ve ever had a Lara Bar, you’ve had a less sweetened version of kaju katli.

Another key feature: while a lot of Indian sweets will look (and sometimes taste) very similar, kaju katli stands out for its distinct diamond shape, coupled with the standard silver foil coating (though some shops will omit the silver to save money, as cashews are already expensive).

Laddu

There’s no getting around the fact that laddus are essentially just round vehicles for ghee, or clarified butter. The base for laddu is chickpea flour—either in its regular form, producing something similar in appearance to a cake ball, or as boondhi, a conglomeration of little fried balls of flour that make for a decadent, texturally rich treat.

I dream of a tower of laddus arranged Christmas-tree style, like a croquembouche—which you’ll sometimes see at particularly fancy Indians weddings, if you’re lucky.

Gulab Jamun

Probably the best known of all varieties of mithai, gulab jamun are spherical, syrup-soaked balls made of milk and flour whose flavor and texture closely approximates that of a thoroughly buttered-and-syruped pancake. Though the predominant flavor in the syrup is rosewater, gulab jamun manages to taste more like a dark caramel, with a slightly roasty depth, making it a perennial favorite of children (and me).

Rasmalai

Think of rasmalai like ile flottante, but cooler and with more milk. It’s a classic dinner party dessert whose floating pillows are made out of fresh cheese curds that get dunked in sugar syrup, then set afloat in a cardamom- and saffron-flavored cream.

The soft and sponge-like texture the curds take on is not for everyone, but on a hot, summer day in New Delhi, a chilled bowl of rasmalai can really hit the spot.

Rasgulla

If the texture of rasmalai is not your cup of tea, go for rasgulla: firmer, denser balls of cheese that only get the sugar water treatment (no cream bath). There are a lot of ways to serve rasgulla: You can enjoy it hot, cold, or room temperature; you can top it with a pool of syrup (to keep it moist); or just leave it by itself. Out of all the varieties of mithai, rasgulla tastes the most like pure sugar—but in a pleasant, not overbearing way.

Cham Cham

Cham cham is like a more dressed-up version of rasgulla. They two sweets involve roughly the same preparation; but the difference, with cham cham, is that you’ll often see it dyed bright colors and split in half, stuffed with shredded coconut or crushed pistachios.

As a result, cham cham is always a popular party or wedding treat. Even without the color or stuffing, you can always differentiate cham cham by its egg-like shape — probably a trick invented by mithai shops to distinguish between cham cham and rasgulla in the preparation process.

Jalebi

If you’re at a mithai shop, you’ll have a hard time missing the jalebi: bright golden squiggles of deep-fried dough that sit in a pool of syrup until their insides turn sticky and gooey. The end result is crispy on the outside but chewy on the inside, with each bite revealing a pocket of syrup. Like at Evergreen, it’s not uncommon in India to see jalebi being prepared by street vendors in portable fryers, the lingering smell of just-fried dough permeating the roadways.

Peda

Peda

A thumbprint cookie in appearance and fudge-like in texture, peda are little coins that start with the same base as burfi. But instead of stopping at burfi, the base then gets mixed with saffron and cardamom, and flattened into a small circle. Most pieces will have a little crater in the middle where a sliver of pistachio or an almond will be pressed in, for crunch. For Indians, peda is a very popular way to break fasts, as it’s easy to prepare, and with the combination of milk, nuts, and spices, it’s said to provide a burst of energy.

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