Ingredients & Substitutions
Sugar substitutes can sometimes approximate sugar’s textural role in baking, but they do not reliably match it across products. The supplied studies suggest that partial replacement often performs better than complete replacement: 50% replacement produced muffins with texture similar to the control, while full replacement generally changed firmness, spread, color, volume, or crumb structure.
Results depend strongly on the substitute and the baked product. Tagatose produced dough with rheological properties similar to sucrose dough, but the resulting cookies were harder, darker, and less spread. In muffins, 50% replacement with stevianna or inulin gave texture similar to the control, whereas total replacement made muffins firmer. A sucrose-free sponge cake made with sorbitol and wheat starch developed a different, finer and more homogeneous microstructure and had lower porosity and volume than the sucrose-sweetened cake. The cookie study also indicates that sugar type affects dough and baking behavior through properties such as dissolution and interactions with gluten and starch. Thus, substitutes can be useful, but matching sugar’s full functional role usually requires formulation-specific adjustments rather than simple one-for-one substitution.
Answer last checked 2026-08-18T13:24:58.478Z. Answerlog reads titles and abstracts, not full papers, and does not assess study quality or claim consensus.