4 ms·

Sounds better than sugar! I wonder if they consider using isomalt.

• AstralStorm 10y ago
  Switching to isomalt will drop ~50% in the caloric content, but change mouth feel and water retention a lot. A different confection will be the result.
  • xorxornop 10y ago
    Yep. Adding another lower/zero-calorific sugar but with a positive heat of dissolution (to counter the negative one of isomalt) can really help here. Similarly, you can choose sugar pairs to promote or suppress crystallisation, as the recipe style requires. This is done by selecting sugars with similar or dissimilar molecular geometry and charge distribution.
    • nitrogen 10y ago
      What books/websites/blogs/courses/degrees would one pursue to learn more about food chemistry on a molecular level like this?
    • voidlogic 10y ago
      Like isomalt + erythritol ?
• xorxornop 10y ago
  Why not erythritol? Isomalt can cause some pretty severe gut issues (to which I can personally attest, unfortunately!). It's also still quite calorific (that is, it is metabolised) - erythritol isn't. I can eat it in high quantities to seemingly zero consequence. It's also got an entertaining mouthfeel, where it cools the mouth; so does isomalt, incidentally, but it's not nearly as noticeable. I have done quite a bit of cooking with erythritol, simply swapping sugar out for it, and it usually works great. Erythritol is only about 70% as sweet, so it can sometimes be necessary to adjust for that, but really, most things are already overly sugary, so it's usually unnecessary.