• kryptonianCodeMonkey@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    53
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    21 days ago

    My wife’s family is extremely health conscious and typically eats like rabbits. There’s not a dish they have encountered that couldn’t be “improved” with a metric fuck ton of broccoli, kale, onions, zucchini, etc. But they also love brownies. It is typically their only indulgence at family get togethers.

    But instead of using eggs and oil in the mix like it calls for, they substitute those evil fats with applesauce instead. It kind of sort of works from a textural standpoint, but it definitely still tastes vaguely of applesauce which is not super desirable in a chocolate brownie. Ostensibly the idea is to make it “healthier” and lower calorie. But given all the sugar and other carbs in the batter (including the added sugar from the apples) the calorie difference is negligible but the end result is not the same at all. It feels like they missed the point and messed up the brownies for no reason at all. Doesn’t stop them from calling them “healthy brownies” though. Stretching the definition of “healthy” reeeeaaaal far.

  • Ms. ArmoredThirteen@lemmy.zip
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    46
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    21 days ago

    Pro tip for baking modern American recipes is you can cut about 1/3 of the sugar no problem, up to 1/2 on some recipes. Bran goes really well with blueberries. The blueberry muffins I make are basically lightly sweetened wheat bread and they slap. Muffins are a quick bread but somewhere along the line people wanted to lie to themselves and eat cupcakes while pretending they’re still muffins

      • Ms. ArmoredThirteen@lemmy.zip
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        9
        arrow-down
        2
        ·
        21 days ago

        It may be semantics but I do not consider muffins to be cake, that would make it a cupcake. Muffins are closer to quick bread to the point where any quick bread recipes I have tried work as muffins with no changes to ingredients only cooking time. For sure if you cut too much sugar out of something you lose structure but that’s why I specified American recipes. They generally have way more sugar than what’s necessary for structure and there’s a lot of wiggle room with how much you can take out

          • Ms. ArmoredThirteen@lemmy.zip
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            arrow-down
            1
            ·
            edit-2
            21 days ago

            Quick bread isn’t the same as bread… Although I am seeing that cakes can be considered a type of quick bread so again I think this might largely be related to semantics. Things like banana bread, corn bread, biscuits, zucchini bread, are all quick breads that work as muffins and can have greatly reduced sugar without damaging their structure. The wheat and bran blueberry muffins I make are similar to sweetened wheat bread in flavor but texturally they’re like a dense muffin. I’m not using gluten and yeast for the structure they use other leavening agents which is why they’re a quick bread. My substitutions are: Less sugar, use whole wheat flour, sub some flour with bran and wheat germ. No I don’t have any dietary restrictions

            Edit to add: Also muffins don’t have to be sweet like at all. There are plenty of savory muffin recipes that have little to no sugar, because they’re a type of quick bread not specifically cake

              • Ms. ArmoredThirteen@lemmy.zip
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                1
                arrow-down
                1
                ·
                20 days ago

                I already said that I don’t have dietary restrictions also biscuits are typically referred to as being made with biscuit dough, not biscuit batter (at least where I’m from). I think discussing the differences between a dough and a batter in this context though is straying too far from what we’re actually talking about so I don’t particularly want to get into that.

                I don’t understand why you’re putting quick bread in quotes so I’m asking sincerely do you not know what I mean when I say quick bread? As in something that’s “leavened with a chemical agent rather than a biological one” such as baking soda/powder instead of yeast? Because this includes cake (and brownies and cookies even), I will change my case to be more like: Most people I’ve met in the US aren’t wrong when they say they like muffins but it would be more specific to say they want cupcakes. In my opinion, we often put enough sugar into the muffins to cross the line into cupcake territory. Since they’re both quick breads I’d argue cupcakes are muffins but not all muffins are cupcakes.

                It’s like my roommate kept telling me they like pancakes and so I’d make pancakes and they didn’t like them because they were too thick. By the time I had thinned the recipe down enough for their liking I was actually making crepes, which are a type of pancake. They weren’t wrong by saying they like pancakes but they would have been better off just admitting they actually like crepes and not what is generally thought of when someone says pancake.

                I’m not trying to say that if you reduce sugar it is unchanged. I am saying that quick breads are very lenient with how much sugar can go in them while still maintaining good mouth feel, especially when the recipe already has a considerable amount of sugar as do many recipes that cater to modern US sugar addiction.

    • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      20 days ago

      That’s not as much a difference as one might think because the flour too is mainly “sugar”, specifically it’s starch which gets turned into glucose same as the sweet tasting sugars (side note: it’s quite an interesting process since saliva itself containes enzymes that break the starch into glucose and you can actually test this yourself using iodine solutions - which you should be able to get from a pharmacy - which turns starch purple).

      Ultimatelly when it comes to nutrition, you should care mainly about carbohydrates in general (which includes all the stuff that is not sweet tasting but gets turned into glucose by the human body) rather than sugars specifically.

      Once you look at it this way you’ll find out that a ton of stuff which is not sweet is none the less rich in “sugars”, namelly things like bread, pasta, polished rice and so on.

  • IninewCrow@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    25
    ·
    21 days ago

    My wife … a salad is healthy

    Goes on to make a salad fit for a serving of four people filled with ranch dressing, cheese, bacon and nuts.

    I love her dearly but she absolutely refuses to admit to a smaller salad.

    • Death_Equity@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      13
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      21 days ago

      I also make fat girl on a diet salads, but I am aware of what I am doing with no illusions about how healthy it is.

    • timeghost@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      8
      ·
      20 days ago

      The lady over here: I must buy the thinnest sliced cheese permissible by physics. Also my tea shall be served in a bucket with 3 cups of honey stirred in.

      We have all been damaged by the world in some way.

      • IninewCrow@lemmy.ca
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        20 days ago

        lol … I was visiting a friend who was in the hospital over a period of about a month … all of us had to go stay with him to help the family.

        At one point, I got to know the nurses on the floor and I started offering to buy people coffee just to be nice. I thought if I were nice to them, they would be extra nice to my friend getting treatment.

        Everyone was pretty average with their orders but some of the nurses were pretty strange. One overweight nurse asked for large triple triple (triple cream, triple sugar) … but the best one was a short petite lady that weighed about 80lbs but tough as nails … she asked for extra large 7 cream, 8 sugar (nicest lady ever but I just could not believe the kind of coffee she drank, it was basically a milk shake with a shot of coffee)

  • DjMeas@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    10
    ·
    20 days ago

    You should see some of the “blueberry” muffins they sell at the store nowadays. It’s not even blueberry let alone fruit. Some are so bad and cheap it’s just fruit flavored pellets with the packaging saying “Blueberry flavored” muffins.

  • Anamnesis@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    8
    ·
    21 days ago

    Muffins are cake. I don’t eat cake except on special occasions. I think this is a pretty good rule.

  • some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    21 days ago

    I want you to put the same number of blueberries into each muffin.

    Do you know how long that will take?

    I don’t care, just do it.