Styling and Photography by Baila Rochelleiner
I love playing in my kitchen. I first developed that pastime out of necessity, due to my own food sensitivities. From there, I moved on to working out solutions for countless clients with allergic, metabolic, or digestive dietary limitations. By now it’s second nature for me to look at a recipe and see its potential Full ’n Free makeover.
Pesach is a time when we’re all spiritually “sensitive” to the contents of our food. Some of us have more stringencies than others, but it always helps to be able to take a yummy-looking recipe and figure out how to revamp it. Here are some of the ingredients that I always switch out. You can try these substitutions for Pesach and see if you like them enough to carry over to the rest of the year, too.
Sugar. When I see a recipe that calls for sugar, I automatically think raw honey. Honey is the healthiest natural sweeter. It contains the optimal balance of glucose, fructose, and sucrose to keep our blood sugar even (unlike other natural sweeteners, whose balances are somewhat skewed). Raw honey even offers some nutritional benefits. To sub honey for sugar, I usually halve the amount because it’s so much sweeter than sugar.
In some cases, when I prefer a different flavor, I’ll use maple syrup or silan. For recipes that really need a granulated sweetener to create the right texture, I use coconut sugar; it’s natural, unrefined, and lower glycemic than cane sugar. I find that three-quarters of the amount of coconut sugar is sweet enough to make up for the omitted cane sugar.
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