One of the very best examples is sugar added to applesauce.
It's particularly nefarious because many consumers may be attempting to avoid sugary food and provide healthy foods for children ... only to unknowingly buy, essentially, candy.
And, in any case, you don't need to put sugar in for yeast. The best bread has nothing of the sort. Just flour, yeast, salt and water.
I prefer to not include salt in bread, but I add the required daily amount of salt to other kinds of food, where the added salt really improves the taste.
When used “correctly” as part of a charcuterie plate and/or along with salty stews and meats, this works.
However, many tend to use this bread like they would any other, and frankly it’s well known for how horrible it tastes.
Bread without salt does not taste good at all, unless you’re a highly partisan Tuscan.
Have you personally tried it? I cook for a relative who can't eat salt for health reasons and I make bread for them too, without salt. It tastes from bland to quite-decent=actually, depending on the amount of wholemeal flours I use. For example, 1/3 each of strong white flour, wholemeal wheat and wholemeal dark rye tastes good and smells divine as it bakes.
I think when people say that saltless bread tastes bad they mean plain white bread.
Bread certainly tastes a whole lot better with salt, which is why it's used, but that doesn't make it mandatory.
For home-made bread, I have never used sugar and I have never had a case when the dough failed to grow. I make a bread every day.
It is much faster and more reproducible than in a traditional oven and this allows me to bake a bread every morning, for my breakfast.
The baking time should be determined experimentally. In my microwave oven, the dough made of 500 g wheat flour is baked well in a glass vessel covered with a glass lid in a time of 14 minutes at 1000 W. One minute less or one minute more make little difference. The baking vessel must be large, to allow for expansion.
A basic bread can be made by putting 500 g wheat flour in a hemispherical glass bowl of suitable size (e.g. about 20 cm/8 inches in diameter), adding instant dry yeast (here sold in 7 g bags suited for 500 g flour) to the flour, mixing the yeast with the flour, adding water about 75% of the flour weight, and then kneading the dough.
For this amount, kneading needs about 6 to 7 minutes. I knead with one hand, keeping the bowl in the other hand. In this way, one hand remains clean, free of sticky dough. You need to keep around a pie spatula (or a spoon, if you do not have a pie server), to be able to remove the sticky dough from your kneading hand, when you finish. The kneading should stop when the dough becomes homogeneous, elastic and cohesive. After you do it a few times, it becomes easy to recognize when it is ready.
Then you can transfer the dough from the bowl into the baking vessel and leave it to rest and grow. For maximum growing, you may let the dough rest for an hour, but if in a hurry you can bake it earlier without much difference in the final product.
For the best growing, the dough should stay in a warm place. While I knead the dough, I boil water for tea in the microwave oven. Then, when the dough is ready, I take out the glass teapot and I put the baking vessel on the now warm plate of the microwave oven. I close the oven and one hour later I press the button to start the baking.
It is also possible to make unleavened bread (by not adding yeast), which still grows in a microwave oven much more than traditional unleavened bread. Its main advantage is that it can be ready faster. To make the bread fast, one can also use baking powder instead of yeast, which allows skipping over the resting time. The bread made with baking powder grows well, but it has a more compact and much finer structure than the bread made with yeast.
To the basic bread, there are a myriad possible additions. Most people want salted bread, so salt should be added to the flour, together with the yeast. You can add various spices, seeds or ground seeds. Some spices are best combined with sugar, but this should not be done everyday. With the exception of salt, I prefer to not add anything else uniformly but to lay flat and thin the dough, deposit on it layers of spices, seeds, sugar etc., then roll the dough to incorporate the additions and form it in the baking vessel. In this way, the bread will have alternate layers of plain bread with spices or seeds, so that a smaller quantity of those will produce a taste as intense as a greater quantity that would have been dispersed uniformly in the bread.
I make an 80% hydration dough with strong white, wholemeal wheat and wholemeal rye and give it a few good pulls every 15 minutes. I wet my fingers first and I get almost no dough sticking on them, even in the first few pulls when the dough is the most mushy. I shape it after a couple of hours (depending on how it's going), let it proof for a half-hour and bake it. I get a very healthy oven spring that way especially for a 2/3s wholemeal bread. All thanks to our little fungal friends who essentially do the kneading for me.
I need to figure out the baking though, or perhaps the hydration, because it ends up a bit too humid inside even after 35 minutes baking at close to the oven's max (which should be around 250 C).
I do also see bread on the shelf at the store that contains no sugar at all, so industrial production without sugar is possible.
In actual bread dough, yeast finds all it needs to activate in the flour itself.
I am actually not sure if a candy has enough sugar to cause a spike in an adult, but I imagine the threshold would be lower in a child. Not to mention, children don't understand the meaning of addiction: they just want (more) candies and you had better oblige or else!
Really, fruits should be viewed very much like candy.
A fruit is a complex matrix of sugars, fiber, enzymes, vitamins, and minerals which undergo a type of metabolism that our bodies are principally adapted for and which allows us to assimilate the various components at a relatively optimal rate and quantity, with many self-limiting reactions along the way.
Candy is highly distilled; impacts the GI tract, liver, and pancreas fast and hard; has no nutritional value outside of calories; and is generally a food that the human body has no biological intelligence for assimilating.
Contrast that to fruit, which is the oldest source of nutrition for hominids. We like sweet things and have color vision because fruit has been such a valuable source of nutrition.
1. Modern fruit (last 50ish years in particular) is nothing like wild fruit and is being bred to have higher and higher sugar content. I'm failing to find a decent source for this but what my memory says is that sugar content has gone up 50% or more in most modern fruit varieties compared to heirloom equivalents.
2. Apple sauce is stewed for a long time and doesn't have the same nutritional qualities at a molecular level as raw fruit.
3. Store bought apple sauce always has a least sugar and often a load of other crap added.
I would say apple sauce is somewhere between candy and fresh fruit on the health scale.
Thankfully there are other goals than increasing sugar. Almonds were bred to a lower cyanide content to make em edible. Bet there are plenty other examples.
Vegetables and don't want to be eaten and protect themselves with mild "poison" or a strong shell. Fruit does and can be eaten raw. Vegetables need to be cooked to destroy antinutrients and help digestion. Egg and meat protein can be digested easier after denaturing the proteins through heat. Milk becomes digestible through the enzymes in Rennet. Cheese would make sense to me, no clue about fermented milk products.
The common banana we have today, the Cavendish, is actually a bit less sweet than the common banana before the 1960s.
Back then, it was the Gros Michel, which was sweeter and more flavorful[1]. But these bananas are all a monoculture, clones, and the Gros Michel was wiped out by a disease. The Cavendish is currently in the process of being devastated by a new disease as well, so it's very possible that future generations will be eating a different banana than we are.
[1] One of the reasons why a lot of banana-flavored candy only roughly resembles banana is because it tastes like a Gros Michel, not a Cavendish. Candymakers don't change it because that's the flavor that people have come to expect and want from that candy.
Interesting. Also of note, fruits and the fruits of vegetables world wide seem to be increasing in size and caloric content while decreasing in nutritional content, correlated with rising atmospheric CO2.
I keep reading that, but I experienced (and also heard) the opposite. Store-bought fruit are engineered for maximum shelf-life, size, and looks, primarily. At expense of taste, including sweetness. Organic produce or just garden grown fruits are smaller and uglier, but far sweeter.
Organic produce doesn't have an appreciably better taste in my experience, nor is it necessarily smaller, but garden-grown definitely wins for flavor - you can optimize the time of picking for the sometimes incredibly narrow window of ripeness. I haven't grown them in several years, but I used to plant strawberries every year. I'd get 2-3 perfectly ripe strawberries a day, and they were delicious.
Raspberries are another fruit that has a very, very short shelf life. Even the commercial varieties are only good for about a week after picking, and I've read that the very best varieties for flavor are only good for about one day.
If you're doing anything with berries where flavor is paramount, and whole-fruit texture is not (anything made from a puree), farm-fresh is best and frozen is a very close second. Flash-frozen fruits and vegetables lose the texture of fresh, but they are picked at peak ripeness and typically frozen within an hour or two.
That is not to say that a diet should not contain fruits, it probably should and fruits are most definetly more nutritious than candy, but its not that black and white.
Most cultivated fruits have a sugar content of around 10%, while only a few have a sugar content slightly above 15%, e.g. grapes and (raw) figs.
Only the dried fruits have a sugar content similar to chocolate and candy, i.e. starting from around 60% to much more.
So dried fruits should be avoided, but fresh or defrosted fruits up to a few hundred grams per day should be OK (when no other sweets are eaten).
Calories alone are measured by burning things but it maters if your body has to do work to access those calories.
The more processed or broken down an ingredient is the more available those calories are to the body vs the same amount in its raw form.
I suspect, but don’t know, that liquid sugar in sodas is far worse than in fruit form because your digestive system isn’t processing fibre to get to it.
Think sweetcorn vs cornbread. They could have the same calories but processing cornflour means you’re unlikely to see it again in undigested form. That same can’t be said for raw sweetcorn.