That has got me thinking that this may actually be a useful plant. If it's going to keep on growing without needing too much input from me, it has some very real potential to be a convenient sweetener in the kitchen.
Stevia tastes many times sweeter than table sugar. Just chewing on one small piece of a leaf is a bit too sweet for me. It tastes sweet, but in an artificial way like artificial sweeteners do rather than sugar does. Even so, I was hoping that I could start to incorporate it into some of my baking. Particularly now that I am tossing sugar out of the family diet.
The two main methods of using fresh stevia leaves (ah la an internet search) are:
Dry and crush the leaves and use as a powder
Boil leaves in water and create a syrup that you store in the fridge.
Each of these methods seem like a step too far for a lazy cook like me. One other method suggested was to throw a few leaves in your cup of tea and steep them with hot water. Now this sounded more like me, straight to the point and no mucking around.
So I thought maybe if I could come up with some recipes where the stevia leaves are steeped first in a hot liquid and then the strained liquid is added to the other ingredients. Then I would just need to experiment to workout approximately how many fresh leaves it takes to produce the desired amount of sweetness. At the moment I have no idea.
This afternoon I made some chocolate. I wanted it to be barely sweet. Just sweet enough to take the worst of the bitterness off the cocoa.
This is what I did:
I melted cocao butter and coconut oil in a saucepan and put in a small number (10) of stevia leaves. I left them to steep in the liquid for around 5 minutes. The liquid was not too hot.
In another bowl I put my cocoa powder, then I strained the liquid mixture into the dry. I squeezed and pressed the stevia leaves to get as much 'juice' out as I could.
This worked and did sweeten the mixture, though I would probably need to use more. I am trying to cure myself of a sweet tooth, so I was deliberately keeping it as low in sweetness as possible.
Now to experiment and try the same method in some other things. For something like a cake, I imagine that I would need quite a few stevia leaves. The other thing I would try and remember to do is to bruise the leaves before adding to the hot liquid to steep. I have also read that boiling the leaves in too high of a temperature will render them more bitter. So perhaps pouring boiling water, or milk, or whatever over them and leaving them to steep for a while could be the go. I also imagine that 5 minutes was probably on the short side for length of time to steep them. Next time I would try it for much longer, for example, at the beginning of baking the first thing I would do is prepare my stevia, crush it and steep it, then get on with the other components in the recipe.
I'm pretty happy that I can grow my own sweetener. Now to find a convenient way to use it and incorporate it into my cooking. :)
