Sweet as sugar or rather bitter? If you want to sweeten your coffee or tea, you are spoiled for choice. There has long been a large selection of sweeteners. We present you with a selection.
The raw material sugar
The sweet taste of various types of sugar makes one or the other connoisseur’s heart beat somersaults. It makes us happy. The word sugar originally comes from the Sanskrit word (that’s a language in India) and means “sweet”. How fitting! Many sweeten the classic way with sugar. Whether in fine crystal form, as sugar cubes, syrup or rock candy – it comes in many forms. But what other alternatives are there?
There is cane, beet, maple and palm sugar. These are obtained from sugar cane, the juice of sugar beet or sugar maple and types of palm trees. A total of 194 million tons of sugar were produced in the 2017/2018 harvest year.
sweetener
Good alternatives are, for example, honey, stevia, sweeteners, fructose or types of syrup. Of course, they all have their own taste, so it’s best to try them in a cup of coffee to see what you like. Honey is a food made from the nectar of flowers by bees. The collected juices of the plants are enriched and changed by the bees in their bodies with endogenous substances such as enzymes, proteins and acids. After that, this liquid is stored in honeycombs and matured.
Stevia. It hides in a plant growing in South America. Native people have been using this plant for centuries as a sugar-free and natural sweetener, as the extract obtained from the leaves has a sweetening power that is ten to thirty times stronger than conventional sugar. So you need significantly less for sweetening. Sweetener is either synthetic or made from natural substitutes for sugar. It surpasses the sweetness of conventional sugar considerably. The best known forms are lozenges or in liquid form.
Syrup is available from many manufacturers in a wide variety of flavors. Caramel, coconut and co. sweeten the coffee with an additional flavor. But be careful: some types of syrup are only suitable for cold drinks. In forums you can read from some users that they use their drinks with agave syrup, sugar beet syrup, maple syrup or conventional vanilla sugar (the one used in baking).
There is certainly no one best solution for all people, for all occasions. Rather, it is a matter of taste whether it should be cane sugar for baking and hazelnut syrup in the cappuccino. Basically, you should of course always pay attention to a moderate consumption of sugar and other sweeteners.
