The Absolute Best Way To Sweeten Homemade Coffee Creamer Without Adding Sugar

Buying processed food at the grocery store is a convenient way to stock your fridge, but a little effort in the kitchen can give you more control over what exactly you're putting into your body. One major cause for concern among the public is the added sugar content in their food products, and coffee creamers are notorious for piling it on. We recently had a chance to talk about the topic with Andrea Allen, co-founder of Onyx Coffee Lab, 2020 U.S. Barista champ, and 2021 World Barista runner-up.

Allen is a big proponent of making coffee creamer at home, but she has a unique spin on how to add sweetness that doesn't have anything to do with sugar. "My favorite way is using pure monk fruit," Allen told Tasting Table. "Pure monk fruit is ultra concentrated and sweet. With just a couple pinches, you can really have some great sweetness going on." Having only been approved by the FDA as recently as 2010, there's a lot that people don't know about monk fruit sweetener.

The main thing to keep in mind is that monk fruit is estimated to be roughly 200 times sweeter than sugar. What that means for you in this particular instance is that you probably don't need as much monk fruit as you might assume. Allen says, "A half teaspoon to a couple cups of liquid is best practice. You can always add more, but you, of course, can't take it away."

The fact that you don't need much monk fruit to achieve your desired level of sweetness has an added bonus in that you don't need to purchase as much. One of monk fruit's primary drawbacks is how expensive it can be. That may change in the future, but for now, it's good to know that, while the upfront cost can be off-putting, it doesn't take much for monk fruit sweeteners to work their magic.

Some people prefer to use sweetened condensed milk as the base for their homemade coffee creamer, but just one fluid ounce of sweetened condensed milk contains 21 grams of sugar. If your goal is to reduce your sugar intake, that simply won't work. Monk fruit contains something called mogrosides, which give us the same sensation of sweetness as sugar, but without the actual sugar.

It's rare to find a natural food ingredient that can both be used as a sweetener and doesn't contain sugar. There are other products on the market that have attempted to fill this exact niche of a non-sugar sweetener, but health scares over artificial sweeteners have impacted public interest. By switching your coffee creamer to a monk fruit-based version, you're both limiting your intake of sugar and signaling to the market that you want less sugar in your food. Ideally, corporations will take notice and develop products that fill that market niche. Until then, we'll just have to make it ourselves.