I’m not disputing your general point, but I hate sugar on foods I don’t think of as sweet. I have a marked sweet/savory divide, with only a few things like butter and flour able to participate in either sort of food. I can sometimes enjoy savory foods that have some added sugar but it never improves them, unless the sugar is there to be food for yeast in a bread product.
You might be misunderstanding my point, or I might be underestimating how much you dislike sugar.
McDonalds (and most other fast food companies, I assume) puts sugar on their French Fries, though most people aren’t aware of this. Likewise, when I make tomato sauces (for pizza or chicken parmesan or whatever), I add about a teaspoon of honey to each quart of sauce, which doesn’t make the sauce taste detectably sweet, but does balance out the acidity and makes the overall taste better. In this way, sugar is sometimes salt-like in that it can improve foods at a threshold that doesn’t make them taste sweet or salty.
I don’t tend to eat fast food. Don’t like tomatoes. But I cook for myself a lot, and have made recipes that are savory and call for sugar, and tried them both with and without said sugar, and they’re better without. I accidentally got a bunch of cans of kidney beans with added sugar a few weeks ago and made soup with them without noticing that they had sugar in them, and I could taste the difference in the soup—it was fairly unpleasant for me to eat, while others liked it fine.
I don’t understand—how does it support the general argument? Because other people liked my soup? I daresay they’d have also liked it if I’d used sugarless beans.
Also, what I was really thinking was you provided an example of a company that makes beans with sugar. Ostensibly, the only reason to add sugar to canned beans is to make them taste better—though that obviously backfired for at least one of their customers.
I’m not disputing your general point, but I hate sugar on foods I don’t think of as sweet. I have a marked sweet/savory divide, with only a few things like butter and flour able to participate in either sort of food. I can sometimes enjoy savory foods that have some added sugar but it never improves them, unless the sugar is there to be food for yeast in a bread product.
You might be misunderstanding my point, or I might be underestimating how much you dislike sugar.
McDonalds (and most other fast food companies, I assume) puts sugar on their French Fries, though most people aren’t aware of this. Likewise, when I make tomato sauces (for pizza or chicken parmesan or whatever), I add about a teaspoon of honey to each quart of sauce, which doesn’t make the sauce taste detectably sweet, but does balance out the acidity and makes the overall taste better. In this way, sugar is sometimes salt-like in that it can improve foods at a threshold that doesn’t make them taste sweet or salty.
I love sugar. Love it. But not on savory foods.
I don’t tend to eat fast food. Don’t like tomatoes. But I cook for myself a lot, and have made recipes that are savory and call for sugar, and tried them both with and without said sugar, and they’re better without. I accidentally got a bunch of cans of kidney beans with added sugar a few weeks ago and made soup with them without noticing that they had sugar in them, and I could taste the difference in the soup—it was fairly unpleasant for me to eat, while others liked it fine.
Thanks, that answers my question, and even provides an anecdote supporting (or at least not disputing) the general argument.
I don’t understand—how does it support the general argument? Because other people liked my soup? I daresay they’d have also liked it if I’d used sugarless beans.
Also, what I was really thinking was you provided an example of a company that makes beans with sugar. Ostensibly, the only reason to add sugar to canned beans is to make them taste better—though that obviously backfired for at least one of their customers.