The Sweet Ingredient Every Baker Should Keep In The Pantry

Everyone who bakes has their own favorite ingredients. Take brown sugar, for example. It's not a requirement in many baked goods, but when swapped with regular sugar, it can add a depth of flavor, along with a bit of a smoky taste. And sweets, from cookies to cakes, are moister when baked with this ingredient (via Dohful). 

Baking, however, is not without its complications. If you have ever had a gritty cookie or a frosting that has sugar crystals in it, you understand one of the great problems of baking — crystallization. Sugars tend to crystallize under certain conditions, especially when there's a lot of sugar in the liquid, a condition called supersaturation (per Education.com), and recipes strive to reduce that reaction.

So how do you do that? All bakers know you need flour, sugars, fats, baking soda and powder, eggs, and extracts to make most baked recipes. But there's one sweet ingredient every baker should keep in the pantry.

It's corn syrup. Now I can hear you denying this reality, and you're probably thinking, "isn't that stuff terrible for you?" No, it isn't. The corn syrup you buy in the supermarket is not the high fructose corn syrup that has been in the news in the past few years.

High fructose corn syrup is made from corn syrup, with another sugar, fructose, added. And it's fructose that's the problem. Fructose is found in fruits and it's fine because it's present in small amounts. It's when you start to consume large quantities of it that you get into trouble, according to Healthline. Fructose makes more fat in your liver, excessive consumption is linked to diabetes, and it increases inflammation in the body.

Regular old plain supermarket corn syrup, on the other hand, is what food scientists call an "invert" sugar (per Science Direct). The syrup, which is made from corn starch, interferes with sugar crystallization, per The Science of Cooking, because the sucrose, or simple sugar, in the syrup is split into the smaller sugars glucose and fructose. Sucrose molecules love to hold on to each other, and the two smaller sugar molecules interfere with the party. When the sucrose molecules can't congregate, your baked goods, frostings, mousses, and other sweet goodies will be smoother.

So how do you use corn syrup in baking? David Lebovitz has the answer. He says that a bit of corn syrup will make a shiny smooth chocolate sauce, or adds about a tablespoon of the sweet syrup to caramel to prevent crystallization. The folks at King Arthur Baking Company say to add a bit to your chocolate chip cookies to make them chewy and soft. It's also used in jellies and jams, in pecan pie, of course, and homemade ice cream, per MasterClass.

Now that you know the secret of this magic ingredient, what will you bake? Make pecan pie, rich with toasted nuts and eggs, or try brown butter pecan pie for a delicious variation. These yummy chocolate no-bake cookies use corn syrup, along with sugar, oats, and peanut butter, to make a sweet and chewy treat. Oatmeal cookies are always chewier with a little bit of corn syrup. And classic caramel corn gets its smooth coating from, you guessed it, corn syrup.