Professors: May I rant? Thank you. I recently purchased some dextrose for use in sausage, as suggested by Ruhlman and Polcyn in their Charcuterie book. Regarding the relative sweetness of these sweeteners I find the same nonsense repeated over and over on the Web: namely, that Dextrose is about 70 to 80% as sweet as Sucrose. Fine. No unit reference is ever provided, but I assume it is by mass. (My own empirical taste test with 5% by mass sucrose vs dextrose solutions bore this out. I had to increase the dextrose concentration to a little over 7% to get the sample to taste equally sweet.)
These web sites go on to say that, to achieve equivalent sweetness, 1) you can substitute 1:1 by volume dextrose for sucrose; and 2) if measuring by weight, multiply sucrose weight by 0.7 to get the proper weight of Dextrose. This is nonsense.
I took my own measurements and 1/4 C of table sugar has a mass of 49g. The same volume of dextrose (mine is from Kitchen Alchemy) has a mass of 31g.
If you substitute dextrose for sucrose volume to volume you will end up with 63% by mass of dextrose versus the original sucrose. If the sweetness of dextrose is 70-80% that of sucrose, then your final product will have just 0.63 * 0.75 = less than half sucrose equivalent.
The same nonsense applies for weight adjustment. The received wisdom seems to be to multiply the mass of sucrose by 0.7. So a gram of sucrose * 0.7 = 700 mg, and that time the relative sweetness factor of about 75% leaves you with just 525mg sucrose equivalent.
Am I missing something? This advice seems to be patent nonsense.
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These web sites go on to say that, to achieve equivalent sweetness, 1) you can substitute 1:1 by volume dextrose for sucrose; and 2) if measuring by weight, multiply sucrose weight by 0.7 to get the proper weight of Dextrose. This is nonsense.
I took my own measurements and 1/4 C of table sugar has a mass of 49g. The same volume of dextrose (mine is from Kitchen Alchemy) has a mass of 31g.
If you substitute dextrose for sucrose volume to volume you will end up with 63% by mass of dextrose versus the original sucrose. If the sweetness of dextrose is 70-80% that of sucrose, then your final product will have just 0.63 * 0.75 = less than half sucrose equivalent.
The same nonsense applies for weight adjustment. The received wisdom seems to be to multiply the mass of sucrose by 0.7. So a gram of sucrose * 0.7 = 700 mg, and that time the relative sweetness factor of about 75% leaves you with just 525mg sucrose equivalent.
Am I missing something? This advice seems to be patent nonsense.
**************** END OF RANT ********************
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