The Healthy Eating Guide

Please feel free to subscribe to our RSS feed - that way you will always keep up with our recipes - it's free! Thanks for visiting.

Healthy Eating Guides often stress the need to cut sown sugars in our diet – but offer little by way of alternatives.  There are chemical sweeteners but I don’t particularly like those so I have to find alternatives, and there are many that you can use for both sweet and savoury dishes.

One of my favourites is dried apricots, these are brilliant in crumbles and Fruity desserts or cakes, and are good in a stuffing for chicken or pork.  You can use dried peaches too but I don’t like the flavour quite so much.  If I want to cut down the sugar and fat in a cake recipe I make a date puree by warming some pitted dates in milk and then blitzing them, it does affect the colour of your cake a little but you can barely taste the dates and it can reduce the sugar and fat content by up to half.

Figs, Prunes and Vine fruits are also useful and can be used in both sweet and savoury without any problem.  Do remember to wash any dried fruits you use –they are often dusted in sulphur as a preservative and should be carefully cleaned.

For savoury dishes where you want a sweet flavour rather than actual sweetness you can use Allspice, Ginger, Cardamom, Nutmeg and Coriander  with equal success  Desiccated or shredded Coconut is also useful but be careful that it isn’t sweetened when you buy it, a mistake I made once.  Also useful are fruit juices, particularly Apple which can be used as part of the fluid in any recipe, sweet or savoury.

The best method is to experiment a little and you will be pleasantly surprised by the amount of sugar you can cut out of a recipe.  I also find that with most cake recipes, just cutting the sugar by up to one third causes no problems and fits well within healthy eating guidelines.