Agave are succulents.
All cactus are succulents.
Therefore, agave are cactus.

In fact, even though both are succulents, they are not related. As Milo said, agave are more closely related to the lily (and asparagus) than to cactus.

Agave are succulents.
All cactus are succulents.
Therefore, agave are cactus.

In fact, even though both are succulents, they are not related. As Milo said, agave are more closely related to the lily (and asparagus) than to cactus.

As for HFCS, this has comparable fructose content to table sugar; sucrose being a disaccharide composed of 1 unit fructose and 1 unit glucose. The chemical bond that holds the units together is rapidly cleaved by enzymes in the saliva and stomach. The common HFCS used in softdrinks and processed food is eithe HFCS 55 or 42, which have 55% and 42% fructose, respectively, the balance being glucose. The physiological effects of sucrose and HFCS are, therefore, similar.

I use agave in place of sugar in all of the recipes on my website and have found it to be an ideal sweetener for myself and my family.

Elana

I just bought Bouchon a few weeks ago and it is great.

(It just so happens I turned around in the Organic section of my local market, and sitting on the shelf was a bottle of Blue Agave… which I promptly purchased, having just read this.)

Actually, I have been working my way backwards, it seems, with food books. So many writers like yourself cite MFK Fisher, I’m now plowing through the 50th anniversary edition of _The Art of Eating_. Love her! Next I might even dive into Brillat-Savarin or Escoffier himself…

Whoa, lookie here — I see on Amazon that a new edition of _The Physiology of Taste_ is coming out in October, with an intro by Bill Buford? Interesting!

Sounds like similar to a cactus, but a different family of plant.

http://books.google.com/books?id=iX05JaZXRz0C&pg=PA769&dq=mcgee+cooking+agave&sig=vAKzW9ofXvxvtKssuRLNsA2dFHw

One question: If you get a cut of anything else we order from the same pass through, does that mean you see everything we had in the shopping cart? If so, I swear the econo-saver box of Twinkies are for a friend….

Cheers!

On my Altered Plates blog, I’ve been chronicling not only my own baking/cooking adventures with agave (prior to the Catalano book), but its meteoric rise in usage in the past six months. Just this morning there was an article in the San Francisco Chronicle on agave nectar. Earlier in the week, Time magazine published an article as well. There’s definitely a trend here.

Again, Mr. Ruhlman, thanks for providing such great information on your site.

I haven’t really seen much evidence that fructose is better for you than sucrose or glucose. It’s true that it is absorbed by the blood more slowly, but there doesn’t seem to be much agreement that that’s actually better for you. Some even believe that since fructose is only metabolized by the liver, foods high in fructose put too much of a strain on the liver and can cause liver disease similar to excessive alcohol consumption.

It’s probably too early to know the effects of switching sugar heavily in favor of fructose. Maybe it will turn out to be better for you, but it might be worse. It certainly seems risky to switch from sugars that are a balance of different kinds to one that is heavily skewed to just one. People assume fructose is better since it is what is found in fruits, but it’s very different to extract it and concentrate it – the main reason it is digested well in fruits is because it comes in a package that is also high in fiber, which also slows the absorption of the sugar.

If you have a recipe that works better with agave, then go for it. It seems like it works particularly well for things like sweetening iced tea since it dissolves in cool liquid better than any other sugar.

But to switch a recipe that works perfectly well with regular sugar to agave because it might be healthier (but also might not be) seems unwise and potentially could make things worse. Agave IS a highly processed form of sugar after all, and no more “natural” than regular sugar.

The whole agave thing reminds me of when people all switched their recipes from butter to margarine because they mistakenly thought it was healthier. They ended up with food that tasted worse and found out later that they had been cooking LESS healthy for a couple decades.

If you are worried about refined sugar, swapping for a different kind isn’t going to help much. Sure, buy organic sugar, and use raw sugar when you can. But if you’re worried about things like glycemic index, there’s no substitute for simply eating less sugar. Tweak your recipes when you can to use less sugar, and simply eat less sweet things (less often or smaller portions). People generally eat too much sugar, period. There are no shortcuts or cheats, if you want the benefits of less sugar, you really just need to eat less of the stuff.

HFCS, according to McGee’s book, is about 53% glucose and 42% fructose. Agave nectar is 70% fructose and 20% sucrose. the benefit of fructose, again, is that it must be metabolized by the liver and so is absorbed more gradually into the blood than other sugars.