Share Occasionally Eggs

Why Use it in the First Place?

When I started blogging and recipe development in my early 20s, coconut sugar was what people were using, and it was touted as being a healthy, environmentally friendly option. It tastes good and it’s an easy ingredient to bake with, much simpler than trying to make everything with honey, maple syrup, or dates. I had started using coconut sugar many years before, around when I became vegetarian in my late teens. It was on the ingredient list for many recipes on the kind of health-conscious veg sites of the time.

As an impressionable beginner to this kind of healthy eating and a relatively new vegetarian, I believed what these writers were saying about how nutritious it was - barely even sugar, it’s so full of vitamins! - and so it was all we used for years.

Why The Shift

Like so many others, the cost of grocery price gouging, inflation, and general increases in the cost of living were what first made me reach for a different kind of sweetener. Coconut sugar cost about six times the price of beet sugar in Sweden, imported from far away, processed somewhere else, and usually packaged in plastic. So apart from the cost, it was also a question of whether the supposed health benefit was worth the higher environmental impact.

I had been questioning for years whether it really was a better choice for our health and I simply no longer believe it to be. While coconut sugar does contain more minerals and so on than white sugar, more compared to zero doesn’t have to be much. It’s still sugar and sugar is not a vegetable.

What I’m Using Now

You may have noticed that most of the new recipes on Occasionally Eggs aren’t as sweet as they used to be. We have reduced the amount of sweet baking and treats we’re making in general because I’d like to keep my teeth, thank you very much. When I do want something sweet, I am most often using honey. What I’m getting is produced entirely on a local scale, supports organic gardening and farming, and is easy to buy from people I know personally (and, in future, do ourselves).

Honey is of course also not a ‘healthy’ choice for baking, but it is a good local choice that we can make for our household.

Reducing the amount of sweets in the house is helping our wallet, too. Otherwise we sometimes use dates to get the extra fibre, vitamins, and minerals in while sweetening something (but since they’re also imported, not too often). Maple syrup is a special treat reserved only for pancakes and waffles because it’s all shipped over from Canada.

For recipes I might test for Baked Collective, or if I am hormonal and really want something with sugar, then I usually go for organic beet sugar. While we’ve been living in France I’ve bought cane sugar because it’s what’s been available here in the south. Sugar beets are grown in Europe, especially in the north, and processed and packaged often in the same country in which they’re grown. This is plain white sugar. It doesn’t taste like anything so it doesn’t have the same depth of flavour that coconut sugar, cane, or raw sugar has, but we only go through a couple kilos a year so it doesn’t matter much.

What About You

For recipes on Occasionally Eggs, if you want to use coconut sugar, that’s great and you can follow the recipes with no changes. You can also use brown sugar, cane sugar, rapadura sugar, or just about any type of granulated sugar you like with no changes needed to the recipe. Beet and cane sugar contain a little more water than coconut so they can make things like cookies spread more, but it’s usually not a problem.

For future dessert recipes using sugar, you might see a white sugar in the ingredient picture. So in those recipes instead of specifying coconut sugar, I’ll say any granulated sugar of your choice. I’m trying to use honey for the most part in any case and sharing many more savoury recipes.

And what about you? What are your thoughts on coconut sugar?

Subscribe now