US cake recipes, why are they always too sweet?

[ratcreature]

I made some this upside down apple cake, and I already reduced the sugar by a third in the cake (and put no sugar in the whipped cream), yet in combination it was still so sweet as to be almost inedible. This always happens to me with US cake recipes. Are other people having this problem? In principle I like sweet things, and the cake recipes that came with my mixer for example I make without reducing the sugar, so it's not like I'm against a sugary taste, but whenever I try a recipe from an US blog, things turn out too sweet. I guess I should bake more often to get a better feel for tolerable sugar amounts so I don't have to depend on the recipes.

Comments

[tassosss]

It doesn't surprise me. The amount of added sugar that Americans eat has only kept growing. And it's like a drug, if you're used to eating it then it takes more for things to taste sweet.

[ratcreature]

I like sugar, but not that much. I mean, how desensitized can you become? In taste this was like what I imagine Calvin's Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs to be, and I put a third less in than in the recipe.

[some_stars]

I probably like more sugar than you, but that recipe--holy crap. I would never use more sugar than flour. That's just freaky.

But yeah, Americans are crazy about sugar. It's because everything's sweetened here (generally with HFCS), even stuff that shouldn't be, like cereal and canned tomatoes and any other processed food you can think of. It's all drenched in corn syrup. Plus there's just a cultural expectation that dessert will be really extremely fucking sweet.

[ratcreature]

Yeah, I should have realized that it was too much sugar, even by a third reduced it was still as much sugar as flour. But I didn't really think too much, and generally I like sugar compared to others. My brother for example bakes sugar free apple cake, with just the sweetness from fruit itself, ever since he had children, because he doesn't want them to get habituated to processed sugar.

But sugar in canned tomato? Why? Tomatoes are already naturally sweet. Here in canned tomatoes only citric acid is added for conservation. Sometimes salt.

[kass]

I think this also becomes a class and income issue, too -- generally speaking, the cheapest groceries here in the States are the ones sweetened with high fructose corn syrup. So if one is on a low income, the foods one can afford tend to be the sweeter ones. Which is fucked-up, but there it is. :P

[kyriacarlisle]

In Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century, Laura Shapiro calls this "the characteristic sweetness of much American cooking" - it's so perfect and obvious a description that I've remembered the line ever since I read it.

Checking back in with the source, she dates it to ca. 1910 or so, as cooks got more and more used to stirring processed foods like ketchup into their cooking. After all, sugar-flavored foods were consistent, and reliably pleasing.

[ratcreature]

I like things sweet too. I wouldn't have made caramelized apple cake if I didn't want a sugary treat, but just not quite this sweet. I guess if I baked more often I would be able to judge and adjust better beforehand, but living alone I don't bake that often, so I'm always wary to change too much.

[astridv]

Maybe there was a typo in the recipe and it lists sugar twice by accident?
3/4 cup brown sugar
and
3/4 cup sugar

Yikes, more sugar than flour, that can't be right. I've had some extremely sweet cake in the US but not quite *that* sweet, I think.

[ratcreature]

Well, the two types of sugar made sense, because the brown has more taste and melts a bit easier, so using that for the caramelization made sense, and the recipe listed all ingredients used twice in separated amounts, like the butter. But yeah, I should have realized that even when I reduced it to 1/2 cup each it would be still far too sweet with as much sugar as flour. But I don't bake that often and picking a caramelized apple cake I wanted it to be a very sweet treat, so I thought reducing just a bit would be enough. But it was still too extreme. Otherwise the cake worked well, it's fluffy, relatively quick, it even was easy to remove from the pan, with a nice look, just like on the picture. But if I ever make this again, I'll have to reduce the sugar much more, maybe to 1/4 cup each, that would be 1:2 sugar to flour overall.

[bluemeridian]

I am so very amused because it doesn't surprise me at all. I was horrified the day I happened to idly read the ingredients list on the can of kidney beans I was buying: kidney beans, salt, sugar, and water. "Sugar?!" I had to buy the organic beans just to find one that didn't have sugar in them. I don't even know why I read the ingredients - I certainly didn't expect to find anything in them except beans and salt and water!

[ratcreature]

Canned kidney beans here also sometimes have sugar added, so that is not a uniquely US problem.

[brownbetty]

I dunno, but it helps to remember that the US government subsidizes corn, and as a result, has a shitload of corn-syrup they either have to convince people to eat, or bulldoze down a hole.

[ratcreature]

Sugar beet production has long been supported by the EU, though I think they reformed that not too long ago. Also the result were artificially high sugar prices, iirc, so that way to support sugar beet farmers wouldn't have increased sugar consumption, I don't think, just made cane sugar more expensive, so sugar beets were competitive and all sugar cost more. I did notice that in the last years more and more convenience products here also have this corn-syrup stuff, which I think is due to the sugar protection ending in the trade agreements and stuff, so now corn syrup is cheap here too.

[brownbetty]

Yes, but the US doesn't subsidize corn by raising the price, it does it by paying farmers to produce corn, whether or not there is a demand, which naturally drives the price down quite a bit.

[ratcreature]

Yeah, that would be both anti "free market" and bad for nutrition. Here the cheapest kilo sugar in the supermarket costs about 85¢ right now, though a while ago it was only 70¢. They then raised the prices because commodity prices rose. (As the price rise was anticipated a lot of people were hoarding sugar, and on top of that for a while the sugar prices in Poland were already higher and buying across borders in the border regions, so a lot of super markets would restrict the amount of sugar they were selling to you. My supermarket had a sign announcing that they wouldn't sell more than five packages of sugar to customers, which was quite WTF? for me, not because I wanted to hoard sugar, but because I'm not really used to stores rationing like that.)

[schneefink]

Yep, I always have this problem with US cake recipes, too. Glad it's not just me ;-)

[ratcreature]

Yeah, I have never thought of myself as sugar averse or anything like that. I quite like sweet things, otherwise I wouldn't have made caramelized apple cake in the first place, obviously. Just not *that* sweet.

[acari]

I'm not surprised. I have quite the sweet tooth but I cannot deal with US food.

[ratcreature]

It really seems a distinct regional difference. I like sugar, even lots of sugar (apparent from my choice of a recipe for caramelized apple pie! I wanted a sweet treat). I like food with a sugar coating or glazed with sugar etc. Things here are very rarely too sweet for me, even food that's heavy in sugar like say, cheap supermarket bought cake. It's sometimes sweeter than my preference would be, but not so extreme that I don't like to eat it at all anymore. But the US norm preference seems distinctly higher, judging by US recipes.

[thirdblindmouse]

Anything from Joy of Cooking can have its sugar reduced considerably without fear of undersweetening.

Oddly, I compared the two cake recipes in my cookbook, and the one from my American grandmother has a lower ratio of sweetening agent to flour than the one from my European great aunt. Maybe because it's a family recipe; I've generally found baked goods introduced as made from old family recipes are not as sweet. It's possible that recipe books (and people who learned to bake based on them) may be trying to mimic the mass-produced baked goods sold in supermarkets. I don't know why the regional difference, though.

[ratcreature]

In the cake dough book that came with my mixer with a list of standard doughs the basic one you use for say just a plain raisin cake, it uses 150g sugar for a cake with 500g flour.

[thirdblindmouse]

Yeah, without taking into account the raisins, that sweetener-to-flour ratio would be on the low end among my pastry recipes. My cinnamon cake recipe has 1:1 sugar to flour if you include the topping, while the cherry cake recipe has 1:1 sugar to flour plus up to a pound of fruit plus unquantified cinnamon sugar.

[busaikko]

You have my sympathy.... I usually am pretty brutal to my US recipes. As i live in Japan, the apples here are sweet and not sour, so I usually don't add sugar at all to apple cakes/pies; US baking apples are really sour. Also, US recipes don't separate the eggs, whereas most Japanese cakes involve whipping the egg whites to a foam which is folded into the mixture - I don't know why, but this means the cake is less sweet! [a strawberry shortcake recipe, but I think 120g sugar is too much, I'd halve it] (US cakes tend to be very dense, like a pound cake, with lots of butter and sugar, which is why one forkful is usually enough to fill you up....)

Chemically, I am not sure what role sugar plays in baking, but if you are including fruit you probably don't need sugar -- and you can use something like fruit syrup or whipped cream to adjust the sweetness of your unsweet cake. With apples, if they are juicy then their juice will make its own syrup at the bottom of the pan. Not as shiny-pretty as caramel sauce, but less likely to do horrible things to your teeth...

[ratcreature]

I didn't know that about US baking apples. I mean, the recipe lists Granny Smith, which is not what I used, but the Granny Smith here are not that sour. I mean, you can eat them raw and they taste nice unlike for example the apples the old tree in my brother's garden produces, which you really want to cook before eating.

[nrrrdy-grrrl.livejournal.com]

The last time I baked an upside-down cake from scratch, I was working at a homeless shelter near downtown and I set the cakes on the back stairs landing to cool. It was spring, but there was still snow on the ground so I knew it wouldn't take long. When I went back to retrieve them, there stood a squirrel- right in one of my pans. He had started eating from the center out and was standing in the space he had already consumed.

I had never noticed any difference between urban squirrels and suburban squirrels before, but instead of racing away, startled when I swung open the door, this squirrel simply looked up, a chunk nof cake in each paw, his chewing cheeks bulging, and he looked at me unimpressed as if to say, "Whatta YOU looking at?"

Needless to say, I gave him his privacy and got started making a second cake.

[ratcreature]

Was it a gray one? Gray squirrels can be an aggressive menace. Here the red squirrel is native and those are more timid.

[nrrrdy-grrrl.livejournal.com]

No. Here, in central New York, we actually have black and gray. It was a black one.

[jacquez.livejournal.com]

I thought black squirrels were just a dark variety of the gray squirrel? at least, in my part of the US they are (our population is mostly Eastern Grey Squirrels. Those sumbitches are mean.)

LOL

[nrrrdy-grrrl.livejournal.com]

Please tell me you looked that up on Wikipedia and are not just some knower of random squirrel breed knowledge!

Re: LOL

[jacquez.livejournal.com]

I...actually didn't look it up. But I plead "amateur local naturalist type", in my defense! I can also run down a fairly long list of invasive plants in western Pennsylvania and do you up a pretty good number on native species of the Allegheny plateau...

Re: LOL

[nrrrdy-grrrl.livejournal.com]

Wow, that's impressive. We had some tough squirrels when I lived in Rochester. There was one who used to attack my recyclables and the front porch was right outside my window so I'd hear him out there showing the empties who was boss.

I saw more wild life wandering that city. One night after playing music, we brought band stuff back to our drummer's house and there was a deer wandering around their neighborhood. We had to call the cops. I had to leave before they came, but I called the next day to make sure they hadn't shot it or anything.

The officer on the line said, "We try not to discharge fiearms in residential areas after dark when ever we can avoid it, ma'am."

[ileliberte.livejournal.com]

I always reduce sugar amounts from recipes because I don't like things too sweet, but I've also noticed that cup sizes are not the same sometimes. Like, I've followed some Indian recipes and they give a cup and ml sizes, and when I measure it out in cups, it's absolutely not the same as the amount in ml.

[ratcreature]

But that's probably because the US cup is odd and non-metric. In German a cup as non-standard measure means usually 125ml or 1/8l, the US cup is nearly twice that. I have measuring cup though that has the US measurements on its side alongside the normal metric ones.

[harpijka.livejournal.com]

I'm from Europe and yes, I reduce the amount of sugar in every US cake recipe, and yes, it's almost always too sweet. Maybe it's the habitual amount of sugar in our 'national' cakes that makes us unable to appreciate too much sugar? (in my country traditional cakes aren't very sweet; I don't know any German cakes though, Austrian yes, but not German :)

[ratcreature]

I couldn't really say whether cakes here are "very sweet" as that seems quite relatively. The average cake here tastes quite sweet to me, just not more sugar than flour, as in this recipe. It's more like 150g-250g sugar to 500g flour.

[harpijka.livejournal.com]

250g sugar to 500g flour?! Well I couldn't survive this :)