Have you ever tried using applesauce instead of butter or oil while baking? I have and the foods taste just as good for less the calories. Ever since I started baking, I have used applesauce in pretty much everything I’ve made. The cool thing about it is that no one has noticed the difference. The only difference I have noticed is that it tastes healthier, but still taste just as delicious.
Applesauce is a good source of fiber and contains small amounts of beneficial vitamins and minerals. A one cup serving of unsweetened applesauce provides 11 percent of the daily value for fiber, as well as 4 to 5 percent of the DV for vitamin C, thiamine, riboflavin and potassium. Fiber helps you feel full and may lower your risk for heart disease and constipation. Vitamin C acts as an antioxidant to minimize damage to your cells, and potassium is important for counteracting the blood pressure-raising effect of sodium. You need the B vitamins thiamine and riboflavin for turning the food you eat into energy.
One cup of applesauce has 100 calories whereas, one stick of butter has 810 calories and one cup of butter has 1,627 calories. Oil has 120 calories in just one tablespoon. Not only is applesauce cutting down a lot of the calories, it also takes out a lot of fat. One stick of butter has 92 grams of fat, one tablespoon of oil has 120 grams of fat and one cup of applesauce has 0.4 grams of fat. Applesauce saves you a lot of calories as well as grams of fat.
Make a healthier sweet by substituting the fat with applesauce. A good way to do that is to substitute the same amount in a 1:1 ratio. For example, if a recipe calls for one cup of butter, use one cup of applesauce instead. There are also other ingredients that you can use instead to make a healthier sweet. For example, you can switch eggs with bananas. You even use both substitutions in the same recipe.
Even though, applesauce is a good replacer, it can’t be replaced with everything. There are some foods that need the fat to keep it all together. Cookies for example, need the butter to stop the ingredients from separating. Using applesauce for butter in a cookie recipe will give you a flat and soupy cookie, rather than a fluffy, soft cookie. Applesauce is usually good for soft sweets like cakes, cupcakes, breads, and muffins. Replacing applesauce with your fat, will be an experiment to see if it works properly.
To make a healthier sweet with the same delicious taste, applesauce is a good substitute to replace the fat and reduce the calories. The next time you go to bake something, try using applesauce instead of butter or oil and you’ll be surprised on how good it tastes.
