“Gluten free fake baked goods or pasta won’t work either.”
How are gluten free baked goods “fake”? Everything is chemical, whether you call it momma’s bread recipe from Italy or Processed Polly’s Gluten-Free Bread.
Honestly don’t think it’s a humblebrag. Maybe it is for some people, but that’s an odd thing to be proud of. No sense of ~pureness~ here, I just don’t like the taste of artificial sweeteners. Most of them have a weird sickly sweet bitter taste for me, but I’ve only noticed it in things like yogurt and drinks before I read the ingredients. Stevia’s better, I guess, but I’d still just go with sugar instead. It’s fascinating how different taste buds can be in people.
Certain foods hit the differences on the edge of tasting abilities. Artificial sweeteners are one and bitterness is something humans in general shy away from, though we can learn to like tonic water and grapefruit. Cilantro is another. I wish I liked stevia, though the brand differences make me wonder if I should try again. S has always been very picky about taste of milk and states certain organic brands, certain labels have far better tasting milk than others I don’t get it. But admire his more sensitive palate.
I guess as someone who doesn’t share those sensitivities, some of it seems like a bit of a put-on to me. I’ll be honest.
Well, I have to use artificial sweeteners if I want to sweeten my iced tea (especially if I want it to be horrendously sweet like my grandmother’s Sweet Tea) - and I hate Splenda and Stevia. Equal is okay, but my favorite is Sweet 'n Low. I’ve been known to carry a few of those pink packets in my purse (in case a restaurant only carries the wrong kind of sweeteners). My D tells me that only old people carry sweeteners in their purses…
I grew up drinking Tab. I guess I’m immune to the nastiness of most artificial sweeteners.
LOL, wow that’s the first time i’ve ever been called out for my “purity.” there’s nothing noble about eating sugar instead of sugar substitutes – i think they are all bad for you, sugar definitely included – but having said that, my boss brought in a container of giant danishes for a Friday treat and i just polished off two with my morning coffee.
but if they were baked with Splenda, i would not have gotten past the first bite. them’s just the facts.
trust me if you saw my gut you would see i have no reason to humblebrag about anything food-related.
@great%20lakes%20mom
the cilantro tasting like soap threw me for a loop. i’ve tasted soap. i would not pour some Dawn on a taco. but i would shove lots of cilantro on a taco because it is wonderful. i can’t imagine anyone thinking it tastes as nasty as something like soap.
do people think grapefruit tastes bitter? it might be my favorite fruit. it’s a perfect blend of sour and not-too-sweet. my favorite juice is white (yellow?) grapefruit, ruby red tastes too sweet and not sour enough.
I went to a lecture about sugar once at the US Botanic gardens. The man said that non nutritive sweeteners, whether natural or artificial, may not have calories but they don’t fool your pancreas. Interesting.
I grew stevia a couple of times. If you put a leaf in your mouth it is overwhelmingly sweet, and a little buttery. I thought I would make tea and throw a few leaves in but I didn’t like it much.
Where I live now you can get something called Steen’s 100% pure cane syrup. It is dark, almost black, and tastes like the most delicious molasses ever! So good on oatmeal, pancakes, to use with soy sauce and garlic to marinate a steak, etc. Get some if you can. It’s my favorite form of sugar these days but not for regular baking.
Someone did a study (a SF newspaper?) a few years ago about the difference in baking between refined sugar that is from cane sugar vs. beet sugar. Chemically, they are the same but they bake differently. I’ve always lived where there is Domino sugar which is 100% cane sugar. Apparently, it’s harder to find cane sugar on the west coast. Baking with stevia must be very different.
Scout, leaving aside any taste preferences, SNL dissolves better in cold beverages such as iced tea than Equal and Splenda do.
I don’t use artificial sweeteners these days, I don’t use it in my coffee any more, on the weekend I’ll put a small amount of maple syrup in my coffee for a treat. With Stevia, it depends on what brand you get I found, we used to use a brand called NuStevia (whole foods sells it, but you can get it on Amazon), it isn’t perfect. I have never had anything with an artificial sweetener in it that I couldn’t tell wasn’t sugar, other than maybe the cyclomates they banned back in the early 1970’s (which I wonder if they did controlled studies with them under real world circumstances would prove to be harmful…on review years later, they found that the researchers were paid by the sugar industry, and they were doing things like feeding the rats the equivalent of a human being eating pounds of the stuff a day…).
I haven’t heard of any health warnings with Stevia per se, some of the brands use maltose sugar with it to combat the back taste. The other types all have suspicions around them, Saccharine was tied to cancer (though there was some doubt about the methodology of those studies as well), Aspartame over time breaks down into methanol, and also has a high glycemic index, and Splenda is sugar that has been chlorinated to stop the body from breaking it down, and could potentially cause problems (I don’t know if there have been any long term studies of Splenda).
About the only artificial sweetener I could think of that likely would be safe would be if they found a way to practically produce glucose who chirality was left handed , I believe the sugar we use is right handed in terms of chirality, so if the sugar had that reversed, we couldn’t digest it (or at least that is what the professor in my chem class back in the dark ages said)…then again, maybe changing the chirality would cause problems…
I have gotten to the point that I don’t drink soda much (flavored seltzer if I drink anything carbonated), and if I do would rather treat it as a treat and drink the real thing, I try and find soda with cane sugar rather than HFC (if for anything, maybe my little contribution to getting that out of the food supply entirely, if for the fact it is so cheap thanks to Uncle Sam that it means they use sugar as a filler in so many things, whether or not HFC itself is more dangerous than cane sugar). I usually only drink soda where I am feeling sick or if I have overdone it outside on a hot day, I’ll drink ginger ale to calm my stomach down. I have tried the stevia sodas out there and found them undrinkable (the one called Zevia was horrible), so I’ll stick to what I drink now.
Yeah, PG - SNL is by far the most soluble of the artificial sweeteners (another reason that I prefer it for cold drinks). I’ve used Splenda some when baking but I haven’t been impressed with the results. Actually, I think that when it comes to baking, I prefer to just use sugar and eat less of the final product!
Lots of special snowflakes, Pizzagirl!
Or a lot of people with different taste buds. Can’t understand where the resentment is coming from. So we don’t like artificial sweeteners. Why should you care?
I don’t care! I just think it’s all a little princess and the pea-ish. Also, Stevia isn’t an artificial sweetener.
I drink diet colas but I understand they are a bad choice. I limit them. I’m ok with the taste of sweeteners and don’t spit out the food or drink if I detect a sweetener. Stevia is the best choice healthwise. I understand that some don’t care for the taste.
Haha, princess and the pea was exactly the metaphor I was going to use but thought better of it!
^^^
sounds like a humblebrag to me. you and your action hero tastebuds brook no tomfoolery from wussies like us with different preferences.
I don’t see why it’s a humblebrag or a-princess-and-a-pea situation. Some like the taste of stevia and / or artificial sweeteners, some don’t. They certainly don’t taste much like sugar, other than being sweet.
I happen to love Diet Coke, but hate regular Coke. I can’t stand potato salad, as another example. Does that make me a special snowflake?
People like what they like. No reason to insult them for it!
Some people are “super tasters”, some have really acute tasting in certain areas. One of my D’s absolutely hates goat cheese and can taste it a mile away - or so it seems to me. Another one really, really hated pepper when she was younger. We had to send a dish back once in a restaurant - ravioli in a creamy white sauce from the kids menu - because it tasted like pepper to her. The server came back and said, “oh, the chef put a tiny pinch of finely ground white pepper in the sauce”. The rest of us couldn’t taste it at all but the pepper hater sure could!
Sorry, it’s not a brag for me (humble or otherwise). It’s just a fact. I can taste artificial sweeteners, Stevia included. I’ve gotten used to it in diet cola, which I drink once in a blue moon, but all the “light” yogurts? Can’t eat them. The “light” salad dressings? Same thing. They all have a chemical aftertaste. Now, maybe there have been times that I’ve eaten things made with artificial sweeteners and didn’t notice because I didn’t know. There’s no way I’d know that now. But there have been many times that I’ve taken a bite of something without prior knowledge of ingredients, and knew immediately that there was artificial something in there (usually sweetener, occasionally fat-free “cheese” a/k/a plastic).
So guess what? I don’t use them, and I don’t eat them. I have them in my house for guests who do, but I can taste the difference. You can’t? More power to you.
I don’t understand why anyone would care whether someone likes the taste of ‘alternative’ sweeteners or not, you don’t exactly make 10 grand a year more because you can or can’t taste artificial sweeteners. I agree with another poster, I would rather use regular sweeteners, like honey, maple syrup, or regular sugar, and use it sparingly, rather than use artificial sweeteners and be able to eat a lot more (not to mention that even if you reduce the caloric impact by using artificial sweeteners, eating a larger portion of cake or cookie means you are taking it a lot more carbs, likely simple carbs). For me it is kind of akin to beer, there are people who drink a lot of lite beer, because calorically and carb wise it is lower than ‘real beer’, I would rather drink a bottle of a good beer, preferably a dark ale or lager, then drink a six pack of “budiller lite” or whatnot shrug