Sugar-Free Pie Recipes

[Jessjaime]

Hello all,
I’m pie baking coordinator for an annual church fundraiser. This was my first year coordinating it & I inherited recipes from the old coordinator. I changed a lot of them up to great success but left the apple & blackberry sugar-free pie recipes alone as I know nothing about that type of baking. The recipes called for Splenda as a sugar substitute so that what I used. The feedback I got was that the first couple bites of a slice were okay, then people got an unpleasant chemical taste. Any suggestions for what to use as a sugar substitute that would make the pies safe for diabetics & others that can’t have sugar?

 

[Norcalbaker59]

Hello all,
I’m pie baking coordinator for an annual church fundraiser. This was my first year coordinating it & I inherited recipes from the old coordinator. I changed a lot of them up to great success but left the apple & blackberry sugar-free pie recipes alone as I know nothing about that type of baking. The recipes called for Splenda as a sugar substitute so that what I used. The feedback I got was that the first couple bites of a slice were okay, then people got an unpleasant chemical taste. Any suggestions for what to use as a sugar substitute that would make the pies safe for diabetics & others that can’t have sugar?

Unfortunately all artificial sweeteners impart that bitter aftertaste.

There’s a product called Truvia that is made from a molecule that is extracted from a plant. It is a type of sugar molecules, but not the same type of sugar molecules you find in cane or sugar beet. It tastes a little bit better than splenda.

Diabetes runs in my family and I have a couple us siblings with it. With diabetics it’s far more complicated than removing the added sugar. It’s about the carbohydrates, how the body converts carbohydrates into usable sugar, and blood sugar levels.


Fruit contains natural sugars; so omitting the sugar from the pie filling does not make the pie sugar free. In addition wheat flour is full of starch. Starch is the sugar. Given the high starch content and flour it has a high glycemic index.

The glycemic index is used to measure how high a carbohydrate in a food will raise the glucose levels in the blood. The higher glycemic index, the more it raises the glucose levels in the blood.

Anything with a glycemic index of 50 or above is considered high. Products made with white wheat flour have a glycemic index of 70 or above. By contrast table sugar has a glycemic index of 63. So omitting the sugar doesn’t necessarily make the pie approriate for a diabetic to eat.