The Hidden Sweetness in Chain Sauces

What sugar is doing that is not sweetness

Sugar in a savoury sauce is a seasoning before it is a flavour, and it performs three jobs.

It suppresses bitterness. Sweetness and bitterness compete for attention, and sugar reliably wins. Tomato, vinegar, cocoa, burnt-sugar notes in molasses and the astringency in some spices are all softened by it. A tomato sauce with no sugar tastes sharper and more metallic, which is why almost every commercial one has some.

It balances acid. Vinegar-heavy sauces are unbearable without it. The relationship is close to linear - halve the sugar in a barbecue sauce and you have to halve the vinegar or the result is aggressive.

It browns. In anything cooked or glazed, sugar caramelises and participates in the Maillard reaction. The lacquer on TGI Friday's glaze and the charred edges on peri-peri chicken are both sugar doing structural work that no other ingredient does.

That third job is why a low-sugar barbecue sauce never glazes properly, however good it tastes cold.

How much is actually in there

Per 100 g, from our own calculations of our recipes and from published figures for typical supermarket equivalents. The point is the order of magnitude.

Two things stand out. Mayonnaise-based sauces are low in sugar - the fat is doing the balancing work instead. And the thinner and more acidic a sauce is, the more sugar it needs, which is why sweet onion sauce, with no fat at all, is the sweetest thing on this list.

For context: 43 g per 100 g means a 15 ml portion of sweet onion sauce carries about 6.5 g of sugar - a teaspoon and a half.

Reducing it without ruining the sauce

Four rules, from doing it badly first.

Reduce acid proportionally. This is the big one. Cut the sugar in half and cut the vinegar in half, or the sauce becomes harsh in a way that no amount of salt fixes.

Add fat if you can. Fat and sugar do overlapping jobs in mouthfeel and bitterness suppression. A tablespoon of oil often does what a tablespoon of sugar was doing, in a sauce where fat is acceptable.

Use fruit rather than refined sugar in the cooked sauces. Apple juice concentrate, apricot preserve and tomato purée all bring sweetness with acidity and body attached. The sweet and sour sauce is built this way deliberately.

Accept that glazes will not glaze. If a sauce's job is to lacquer on hot meat, the sugar is structural. Reduce it and you have a marinade, which is a fine thing and not a glaze. Our pages say which is which.

Sweeteners are a poor substitute in cooked sauces: erythritol crystallises, sucralose contributes no body, and none of them brown. Allulose is the one that behaves most like sugar and it is expensive and hard to find.

What our recipes do about it, and what we do not claim

Our recipes generally come in lower on sugar and noticeably lower on salt than the commercial equivalents, and there is no virtue in that - it is simply what happens when you season to taste rather than to a specification that has to survive a warehouse and please a national palate.

Typical reductions across the sauces on this site, against equivalent commercial products:

• Salt: 25 to 40 per cent lower.
• Sugar: 10 to 30 per cent lower, and unchanged in the glazes where it is structural.

What we do not claim is that this makes the food healthy. A home-made Big Mac is a burger. The nutrition hub is explicit about the narrow set of things that genuinely change, and a sauce with 26 g of sugar per 100 g instead of 38 is still a sweet sauce.

Every nutrition panel on this site says it was calculated from our own ingredient list, and where a chain publishes a figure for the equivalent item we show both rather than quietly presenting ours as theirs.