Discover The Unsweetened Tooth
Those peanut butter mousse brownies above are everything you expect — decadently rich, deeply fudgy, and loaded with irresistible sweet-salty, smooth peanut-butter goodness.
But they also lack something surprising — added sugar.
They are the creation of a unique Seattle bakery, The Unsweetened Tooth. As the name implies, this bake-to-order shop makes treats with no added sugar. Yet, they taste every bit as satisfying as their conventional counterparts — and minus the unpleasant aftertaste of so many sugar substitutes such as Stevia.
The bakery was started by Jude Sharp, who worked as an engineer in the tech industry in Silicon Valley with her fellow engineer husband, for years. But a health scare put her on a different path. After learning that she might become diabetic and lose her sight if she didn’t drastically change her dietary habits, she decided to give up sugar, and lost 100 pounds in the process.
Using her engineering know-how and love for tinkering, she built a commercial kitchen, and started coming up with no-sugar recipes after the couple moved to Washington state. In 2016, she launched The Unsweetened Tooth there.
Instead of cane sugar, the bakery uses allulose, a low-calorie sugar naturally occurring in jackfruit, figs, raisins, molasses and maple syrup that has a glycemic index of zero and is 70 percent as sweet as sugar. While it’s cost-prohibitive to extract allulose from those particular sources on a large scale, another version can be made using non-GMO corn, in which its fructose is converted into allulose.
If ingested in great amounts, allulose can cause gas, bloating and other gastrointestinal issues in some people, Sharp says. But in moderate quantities — what you might consume in a serving or two of dessert — there shouldn’t be any effects.
I certainly didn’t have any after devouring the peanut butter mousse brownies (six for $42). I was just amazed at how wonderful they were without any added sugar. You certainly wouldn’t know they lacked anything upon diving into them. They are shipped frozen, so just defrost and let them come to room temperature before enjoying.
The Unsweetened Tooth also makes fruit curds without any added sugar ($12 for a 9-ounce jar). They come in four varieties: Lemon Curd, Peach Curd, Sour Cherry Curd, and Blackberry Curd. Unlike jams, they contain a higher proportion of juice to sugar, as well as butter and eggs, giving them a more lush, velvety texture and a richer taste.
The lemon is bright and zingy, the cherry is a nice balance of sweet and tangy, the peach is pie-like, and the blackberry tastes like a berry blast smoothie.
Spread them on toast, scones or biscuits. Or spoon into the center of thumbprint cookies. Or swirl them into your favorite cheesecake batter.
With no sugar added, they are definitely a guilt-free pleasure.