Less Sweety Pie

My wife an I have recently been on a quest to remove unnecessary naughties (fat, calories, and sugar, mostly) from the foods me make. I have a natural tendency towards the French style of cooking. For example, making scrambled eggs for two requires at least a quarter cup of cream. I've been working on cutting back on the fat and calories, but that's still a work in progress. Instead, let's talk about sugar.

My wife and I have a tendency to adopt recipes for baked goods from various sources, foodtv.com and American's Test Kitchen mostly, and we generally have some kind of dessert every night after dinner. Most American baked good recipes are on the sugar-heavy side, and our regulars are no exception. ATK's recipes are generally a little less eggregious, but we still thought there was room for improvement. And there was, with one dish at least.

This crisp recipe is one of our favorites. I probably bake four a month. The best part about it is that it's versatile. It works equally well with peaches, apples, plums, whatever. Since we make this recipe so often, it seemed like a natural place to start. In our first pass, we dropped the 1/4 cup of sugar that goes into the fruit and reduced the 1/2 cups of white and brown sugar to 1/3 cups. It actually tasted better. The flavor of the fruit shown through more clearly, and the tartness was actually more palette pleasing than the sweetness it had replaced.

My wife wasn't satisfied, though. Next the butter went down from a stick to 6 tablespoons. The impact was noticeable, but not necessarily in a bad way. I liked it better because it made the remaining sugar stand out more. My wife didn't like it as much because it lost some of it's crispiness. Worth a try.

Tonight we decided to see how far we could push it. Using a low-calorie apple crisp recipe my wife found on the Internet as inspiration, we tried something radical in the form of a peach crisp. Not only did we drop the 1/4 of white sugar from the fruit, we dropped the white sugar from the recipe entirely. We also dropped the brown sugar down to 1/4 cup. To make up for the missing sugar, we upped the oats by 1/2 cup. Even more radical, we dropped the butter down to 4 tablespoons. To make that work, we had to melt the butter before mixing it into the topping.

The result was actually quite good. It's not the sort of dish I would expect to get rave reviews if served at a party, but for an every-night dessert, I think it's perfect. It really lets the fruit take center stage, and the guilt factor is next to zero. With fruit that's less sweet than very ripe peaches, a little more sugar might be necessary, but it's still low cal, low carb, low sugar, delicious and easy. Doesn't get much better than that.