Stevia Recipes

Cooking with stevia is an art.  It’s not extremely difficult to master, but you have to be very patient with yourself and comfortable with the nature of herbs and spices.  Remember when you were figuring out just how much paprika you should use in a recipe?  The learning process is about the same with stevia.

There are a couple of reasons determining how much stevia herb to use in a recipe is difficult.  I’ll explain how to work around them.

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Stevia, like any other plant, has a season.  It is also grown in different places.

Stevia grows best and sweetest in a temperate climate with a rich soil.  Its peak season is in the fall, just when the flowers begin to bloom.  While it’s flowering, it’s getting sweeter and sweeter until its reproductive state starts to decline for the year.

Organic farms that grow with care produce the best stevia, hands down.  No mass farming effort can match stevia grown with natural fertilizers.  The leaves are also very sensitive, and its chemistry is naturally mildly anti microbial.  Most pests don’t like it either, so pesticides harm it rather than helping it.

If you know where the stevia comes from, that will help with determining how much you should use.  If you don’t then you should do a steeping test to see how strong the stevia you got is.

Put a teaspoon of stevia herb into 250 ml. (a full glass) of hot water, and let it settle.  Then stir it and let it settle again.  Then taste it.  Ideally, it should taste as if you’ve put about 1/8 cup of sugar into the water.  Do this every time you buy a new batch, and you’ll know the strength of what you have.

Stevia is a different kind of sweet than sugar.

Sugar, honey, and artificial sweeteners have an immediate sweetness.  Stevia has a slightly delayed sweetness.  It doesn’t take much stevia to make something sweet, and if you use too much, it’s overkill.  The problem is that because of the delayed reaction, it’s common for people to accidentally use too much.

The solution is to trust your strength test.  Don’t use more than necessary in a recipe.  People who must avoid sugar and are used to stevia will understand the delayed sweetness.  However, if you don’t want people (like the kids) to know what they’re eating is “health food”, then there’s a little trick.

Use a little natural sweetener, such as fruit paste or puree, or honey, to provide the initial sweetness.  By a little I mean really very little.  If, for instance, a recipe calls for a cup of sugar, you would use 1 tablespoon of stevia herb powder “bloomed” in about 2 tablespoons of very hot water, and only a teaspoon of honey or a tablespoon of silan (date syrup).  You can also use apple juice as part of the liquid in the recipe instead of any kind of syrup.  Stevia will stretch natural sugars a very long way.

Hopefully, these tips will help you in determining the sugar-stevia equivalent, or make your stevia recipes less of a risky exercise.  If you have any questions, feel free to comment.

Happy cooking!

Stevia is an herb that is naturally sweet even though it has no sugars or carbohydrates, and no calories.  Its sweetness comes from special natural compounds called steviosides.

Although it is used often as a natural sweetener in Asia and Europe, and as a medicinal herb almost everywhere, it is not marketed for this use in the U.S. because of FDA policies.  Although it has been found to be safe when used in reasonable quantities, there is valid suspicion that the companies marketing other non carbohydrate sweeteners with saccharine and aspartame put a lot of money into suppressing stevia.

Food and drink manufacturers however, are beginning to see that there is a great demand for more natural products.  The Coca-Cola company in particular, launched Zero, which used steviosides and aspartame in combination, to make a better tasting diet cola.  It would have been nice if they made one that only used stevia, but well, baby steps.

How to Use Stevia

Stevia is said to be about 200-300 times sweeter than sugar by weight, so a little bit goes a long way.  To use it as a sweetener in your tea or other drinks, put about a tablespoon in one cup of hot water, and wait until the herb settles to the bottom.

One tablespoon of this concentration will usually be as sweet as a tablespoon of sugar.  Take care because sometimes it will be sweeter, depending on how close to the peak season the stevia was harvested.

Another way to do the same is to use a French press.  The screen in it will catch the particles of the herb if you prefer not to deal with them.  It won’t hurt you to eat the herb though.

In cooking, stevia can also be used as a powder.  There are stevia extract or stevioside powder packets that work about the same as other low calorie sweeteners, but to get the most benefits, it’s best to use stevia herb powder.  This way you get all of the ingredients that are naturally in the plant, which is better for you.

A teaspoon of stevia herb powder is as good as a half cup or more of sugar as far as sweetness.  The only problem is that it has no sugar or other carbohydrates, so it will not help with browning.  It should also not be used as a sugar substitute in canning.  However, it can be used as a sugar booster to reduce the amount of sugar you will need in a recipe.

You can cut the amount of sugar in most cake recipes by half or more, and use the absolute minimum needed for preservation in canning.  The difference as far as taste can be made up by stevia.

When we post recipes on this site, we’ll include details for preparation.