Sugars or sweetening agents have the following purposes in baking:
• They add sweetness and flavor.
• They create tenderness and fineness of texture, partly by weakening the
gluten structure.
• They give crust color.
• They increase keeping qualities by retaining moisture.
• They act as creaming agents with fats and as foaming agents with eggs.
• They provide food for yeast.
We customarily use the term sugar for regular refined sugars derived from sugarcane or beets.The chemical name for these sugars is sucrose. However, other sugars of different chemical structure are also used in the bakeshop.
Sugars belong to a group of substances called carbohydrates, a group that also includes starches.There are two basic groups of sugars: simple sugars (or monosaccharides, which means “single sugars”) and complex sugars (or disaccharides, meaning “double sugars”). Starches, or polysaccharides, have more complex chemical structures than sugars. Sucrose is a disaccharide, as are maltose (malt sugar) and lactose (the sugar found in milk). Examples of simple sugars are glucose and fructose.
All these sugars have different degrees of sweetness. For example, lactose is much less sweet than regular table sugar (sucrose), while fructose (or fruit sugar, one of the sugars in honey) is much sweeter than sucrose.
