sugarrrrrrgh!

[emmac]

i know i'm quite possibly the only person on this forum who is sugar-free but it is troublesome that so many wild food recipes call for my body weight in sugar.

i LOVED john lewis-stempel's Wild Food book (have you read it? you must read it now) because he was living on wild food for a year and only allowed himself honey and no sugar.  the thing about using honey instead of sugar in syrup recipes is that it doesn't tend to last as long and i've had things ferment too... 

i'm just spraffing here really but if anyone comes across wild food recipes that are sugar free or work well with honey/xylitol/maple syrup then i'd be keen to hear of them

thanks

[cab]

No sugar AND no booze? Kudos to you!

Honey ain't a million miles from sugar, its predominantly fructose and glucose and thats what sucrose almost immediatley breaks down to anyway.

But theres a heck of a lot you can do with honey - sweeten fruit with it when stewing or making pie, mash up elderberries with boiling water and sugar and let it cool to make a beverage with the colour of freshly drawn blood to eat at halloween, fold honey in to whipped cream with blackberries to make a divine fruit fool... Ultimately honey will do most of what you can do with sugar but at greater expense, with more fuss, and often more flavour

[emmac]

Yeah, honey is great. Just to be extra annoying I like to keep the honey raw to preserve nutrients! I don't make things easy

[Brewforagegrow]

I just lick pollen off a bee. More enjoyable that way

[emmac]

bee licker!

[Brewforagegrow]

I've been called worse

[herbwise]

This is a fun topic!! Never heard of the book but I will have to look it up and give it a read. I make it a point to limit our sugar intake as a family. But to be honest I view sugar as not so much a demon after the American scourge of High Fructose Corn Syrup (which not only is insanely horrendous FRUCTOSE sugar levels, it crosses the blood brain barrier and gets metabolized in your hypothalamus which is the control center for the hormonal cascade in your body (and fellow Americans act perplexed at our diabetes epidemic which has its roots in hormonal disorders right?))..HFCS is in literally everything you can buy conventionally in an American grocery store: crackers, ketchup, sausage......jesus. Especially soda, which lol get this, our standard "Ginger Ale" literally has no ginger and is sweetened with HFCS and in the t.v. commercials they show a ginger ale soda machine popping up out of a corn field. Call it High Fructose Corn Soda already!! Ridiculous.

ANYWAY due to the scourge of HFCS I don't freak out half as much about sugar anymore...I tend to breathe a sigh of relief when I see it's just sugar and not HFCS. Besides, sugar is used so readily in syrups etc. because it is a preservative, as is salt. That's why our great grandparents generations would load everything down with sugar or salt.... I am totally in agreement that we use way too much of it. I prefer to lactoferment where I can to avoid sugar preservation. Stevia is great but is super super sweet and tends to have a bitter aftertaste, but it doesn't register as sugar in the body. I tend to gravitate to raw cane sugar that hasn't been separated from the nutrients in the plant.....and molasses and maple syrup etc. I'm no sugar expert...but as I understand it, dark fall wildflower honeys have more maltose and dextrose while light summer honeys are higher in fructose and sucrose. Light honeys thus will ferment fast into mead and make a drier honeywine, dark honeys ferment slow and make a smooth, robust honeywine (for our wedding I made a fall honey mead with hibiscus and lemon zest...delicioussss). I must assume dark honey metabolizes slower in the body than light honey as well, just as an interesting tidbit to chew on. Makes sense from a natural order perspective, one needs the quick acting sugars for all the summer activity and slow acting sugars for a sedentary winter of trying to keep warm......

Also honey is bacteriostatic (and antimicrobial) due to the sugars and low water content. Works wonders on wounds. Once the water content rises above, I think it's 18% a beekeeper friend told me, the wild yeasts are activated and it will ferment. Mmmm mead. delicious.

[emmac]

Yeah, I'm delighted I'd something I want to buy has raw cane sugar or unrefined as opposed to normal sugar. I do like maple syrup which has the added benefit of b vitamins but yeah, sugar is a preserver.

would love some mead right now but off the booze too... :/

[lucyblack]

Herbwise, that is great info about the seasonal honeys and the different properties! Thank you!

Like Emma, I WAS sugar free for years. Until I got into foraging and the syrups enticed me too much :-) This year I've made elderflower and meadowsweet cordials and am currently cooking up a big batch of eldberry cordial which I'll have in hot drinks throughout the winter. Haven't got used to jams yet though - too high in sugars so makes me jangly, and not in a good way!

Emma I wonder if pasteurising stuff with honey would extend the lifespan, but then would pasteurising kill the goodness of the honey? Seems pointless if you're using raw honey and that stuff is so expensive!

[edenwildfood]

Hi Lucy, welcome to the forum. Have you seen mark williams Elderberry Vinegar? its got a lot of sugar in it, but i wonder if it would work with honey to sweeten, as the vinegar would be preservative anyway. www.gallowaywildfoods.com/?page_id=1219

[lucyblack]

Oh indeed I have edenwildfoods - I am a BIG fan of Mark's. And the vinegar is amazing. I made some last year, but am thinking I might make bramble vinegar this year. Not sure. But I want all my elderberries to go into cordial. I am seriously OBSESSED with that stuff!

[emmac]

Yeah Lucy, I'm just keeping the honey raw and making stuff as I need it instead of preserving the bottle. My chest freezer is stowed!!!