Stevia

I am growing Stevia in my garden.  It's doing it's own thing and growing okay.  It's a straggly plant, but is still alive after a full growing season.  It did flower a few months ago and I expected that it would die.  But it has finished flowering and has continued on and added some new growth.

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. :)