I was explaining this to my daughter in quite simplified terms the other day- we evolved to taste sugar and enjoy it because finding a sweet edible plant meant we had a source of energy to help us hunt that day. Pretty useful if you’re a hunter-gatherer.
So we seek out sugar. Now we can get it whenever we want it, in much more massive quantities than we are supposed to be processing. Most of us are addicted. I’m not an exception.
To be fair, if you make pasta sauce from scratch you’re going to be using a fair amount of sugar to balance the acidity of your tomatoes, so I don’t find pasta sauce a useful demonstration.
But you’re still making a good point. Once you start making stuff yourself, you really see what isn’t required.
I have literally never once added a single granule of sugar to a pasta sauce. Heat and time on the stove are the only 2 things required to balance tomato acidity, and even this can be cheated with tomato paste. If you are putting sugar in pasta sauce, you don’t now how to cook pasta sauce. It’s shocking that your comment has upvotes…
Add me to the team that at least almost never adds sugar to any pasta sauce. In very rare occasions, I might add a tiny bit of honey, but I can’t remember the last time I did that.
And honey is sugar.
The difference between it and table sugar is negligible from a glycemic response perspective.
I have never put any sugar in my from scratch sauce. But that’s probably why I don’t like jar sauce.
Carrots are common as a sweetener and thickener in some veggie based sauces. Melinda’s hot sauce uses them too
You get it from different sources. Breakdown of onions and as someone else mentioned, carrots. Balsamic vinegar has some. There’s other sources as well, I’m just blanking on them.
But agreed, I rarely add actual plain sugar to my pasta sauces.
I don’t put anything like that in my sauce. Tomatoes, garlic, olive oil, herbs and spices.
I think cooking it for hours tends to lower the acidity a bit.
But I think I just like it that way.
Yes, but aren’t those sugars much different (read: better) than refined cane sugar (or worse: HFCS)?
If you can grow your own tomatoes, give Amish Paste Heirlooms a try.
They grow small, but a single plant can produce hundreds of low acidity balanced tomato fruits that are perfect for pasta sauce.
Ooh, thanks, that sounds Intriguiging! Will try them next cycle (I have a couple small hydroponic setups).
If you let the sauce simmer for long enough, 4-5 hours, or pressure cook it the starches of the tomatoes will break down and you won’t need to add sugar. The acidity will also go down the longer it’s simmered too.
Both yogurt and pasta sauce are extremely easy to make from scratch, and sugar doesn’t belong as an ingredient in either. Yogurt literally makes itself. Stop buying processed foods that are designed by teams of people to be addictive?
Anything that exceeds the difficulty of a assembling a sandwich or put something on and off a grill, is something I’m gonna leave to the pros.
If you are capable of operating a motor vehicle to drive to buy sandwich ingredients or safely lighting a grill, then you’re just being lazy.
I love a biscuit breakfast Sammy. I can buy one for 3 bucks, or spend 20 dollars and 2 hours making a less good one
A bit of brown sugar really helps bring a red sauce together and yogurt is good sweet or savory (granted I like my sweet yogurt to just be sweetened with fruit and no pure sugar added but that’s a preference thing)
As per usual in my responses to comments like this, just because it is easy for you to make these things doesn’t mean it is easy or practical for everyone to. From scratch takes longer, requires more knowledge which takes time to acquire, makes more dishes, requires more types of equipment, and in the case of yogurt can be a safety thing
It is on the companies making these products to do better not on the individual seeking to make a part of their life easier
It is on the companies making these products to do better not on the individual
I mean, it’s literally not… What will make or pressure the companies to do “better”? If the answer to that question is something that does not exist or is not happening in real life, then no, it’s genuinely not on the companies, you just wish it was.
Reminder: grocery stores and industrial processed food are a very recent invention
Fruit yoghurt is pretty much yoghurt with fruit jam added, so it ends up with quite a lot more sugar than the natural stuff which has no added sugar, so ever since I’ve had to start watching out for my sugar intake I’ve started only eating the natural one and adding cinnamon or vanilla extract for flavour.
It’s amazing how after a while of cutting sugars from your food you get used to it, don’t feel the need for it anymore and even start finding the most sugary stuff (like certain kinds of sweets) unpleasantly sweet.
Buy a yoghurt maker. You add milk, 5% of already existing yoghurt and whole fruit (berries are best). Leave overnight and now you have yoghurt with fruit and no added sugar. The fruits are whole so they have fiber and any natural sugar in them isnt going straight to your blood now.
sugar doesn’t belong as an ingredient in either
Ya says who? Almost all sauces are made with a little sugar. It helps cut the acidity.
You don’t need to add a ton but to say you NEVER add sugar to sauce is ignorant.
Try making tomato sauce without sugar. Get back to me when you’ve tasted your horror.
This is ridiculous, I hardly ever make tomato sauce with (added) sugar and it tastes delicious. I suppose if you’re used to sugar being in everything it may taste odd, but it is far from horrendous
After reading the other comments for a bit, it may depend on the tomatoes. The tomatoes I tend to use don’t need to balance out as much, I suppose
If you can afford it, using good quality Italian tomatoes really make a difference.
I don’t add any sugar in my sauce and it is pretty good and the acidity is at a good level.
Yes, but San Marzano tomatoes that are sweeter are still only 3g of sugar per 100g, and 2g of net carbs per 100g.
And if you make a mirepoix for your sauce, the sugars in onions and carrots are higher.
So for people that are afraid of sugar, a sauce made with tomatoes, carrots, onions and celery isn’t as scary as adding sugar.
And the acidity isn’t considered as well. From experience, they are less acidic as well, so you don’t need to add sugar to mask that.
I’ve never tried stevia in tomato sauce. I’ll give it a try sometime. I’d worry about making it too sweet though since a lot of sweeteners are thousands of times sweeter than sugar.
I haven’t either, but I think it would work pretty well. The nice thing about stevia is that there are different products to buy with different levels of sweetness. I always put a stronger stevia extract in my tea at home that I get from Amazon because the stevia packets they have in restaurants next to the other sweeteners do not even come close to as sweet.
Then I have to use the tiny little cocaine spoon that comes with the extract to put some in my tea, and less than a full spoonful because it’s so sweet.
I’ve also seen stevia products made specifically for baking, so that might be worth a try since I’m guessing they tried to get it 1:1 with sugar.
Counterpoint:
https://www.raos.com/products/marinara-sauce
**Ingredients: **Italian Whole Peeled Tomatoes, Olive Oil, Onions, Salt, Garlic, Basil, Black Pepper, Oregano.
Kinda misrepresentative using granulated sugar. Not all sugar is the same, nor does it have the same effect in your body.
Most added sugars are going to be HFCS these days. But also, that’s under the assumption of added sugars, which the image doesn’t make any specifications about; a lot of ingredients used in pasta sauces, for example, are going to have natural sugars already.
I just take issue with the misleading image, which would have you believe that a cup of Yoplait is 45% sugar, even though you can read the label and do the math, yourself. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a lot of sugar, but not “nearly half the product” levels.
Pretty much any food you buy that comes from a box or a jar is going to be littered with sugar.
If you want to cut sugar out of your diet you need to start eating whole food that you prepare yourself.
Most people are too lazy for this so they scarf down processed foods that slowly kill them.
![This is how much sugar you are [possibly] eating.(lemmy.world)](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/9694cd80-f133-4b02-80e3-1e937a78ea83.png){kind=link}