Sweetness calculator

How sweet a recipe tastes, against sugar.

Sweetness percentage measures how sweet a recipe tastes against sucrose — ordinary sugar. Sugar is the baseline, at a relative sweetness of 100%, and every other sweetener is measured against it: honey, at about 110%, tastes a little sweeter than the same weight of sugar; glucose, at about 70%, tastes weaker.

Every ingredient’s weight counts towards a recipe’s total, but only a sweetener’s weight counts towards how sweet it tastes. Weighing each one by how sweet it is and setting that against the recipe’s whole weight gives one number that reads the same way across a bread, a cake or a custard.

Every ingredient’s weight, times how sweet it tastes against sugar.

Savvy multiplies each ingredient’s weight by its sweetness relative to sugar and adds those figures together — that total is the recipe’s sucrose-equivalent weight. Dividing it by the recipe’s whole weight gives the sweetness percentage. An ingredient with no recorded sweetness — flour, butter, an egg, salt — still counts towards the total weight, but adds nothing to the sucrose-equivalent.

Sweetness is not sugar content.

How sweet an ingredient tastes against sugar is one fact. How much of its weight is actually sugar is a different one. Stevia holds no sugar at all and tastes very sweet; golden syrup is mostly sugar and tastes close to it. The two are never read in place of each other.

The same recipe answers other questions.