Most recipes are written for sugar. Swapping in a substitute means adjusting quantity, and often adjusting technique too. This is a working reference for the conversions, plus the parts of the job that a ratio alone will not solve.
Conversion Chart
All ratios are per 1 cup (about 200g) of white sugar.
| Sweetener | Use instead of 1 cup sugar | Adds bulk | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Allulose | 1 1/3 cups | Yes | About 70% as sweet, so slightly more. Browns faster, lower oven temp. |
| Monk fruit (pure extract) | About 1 tsp | No | Must replace bulk separately. |
| Stevia Reb-A (pure) | About 1/2 to 1 tsp | No | Grade dependent. Bitter if overdosed. |
| Sucralose (pure) | About 1/2 tsp | No | Heat stable. Very small quantities. |
| Date sugar | 1 cup | Yes | Does not dissolve. Textured bakes only. |
| Erythritol (not stocked) | 1 1/3 cups | Yes | No browning. Cooling aftertaste. |
The Bulk Rule
This is the part most conversion charts skip. Sugar is not just sweetness. In a cup of sugar you have roughly 200g of physical material doing structural work: creating volume, holding moisture, tenderising, helping with browning.
High-intensity sweeteners give you the sweetness in a teaspoon and none of the rest. Replace a cup of sugar with a teaspoon of stevia and your cake is missing most of a cup of ingredient.
The general approach: use a bulk sweetener as the base, then add a small amount of a high-intensity sweetener to bring the sweetness up to full strength.
A reliable starting combination is 1 cup allulose plus 1/4 teaspoon monk fruit extract to replace 1 cup of sugar. The allulose handles volume, moisture and browning; the monk fruit closes the sweetness gap without adding more bulk.
Adjusting by Recipe Type
Cookies. Spread and colour come from sugar. Allulose gives you both. Expect faster browning, so drop the oven about 10 degrees and check early.
Cakes and muffins. Bulk matters most here. A pure high-intensity sweetener alone will give you a flat, dense result. Use a bulk base.
Custards and sauces. No structural requirement, so high-intensity sweeteners work fine on their own. Add at the end and taste.
Ice cream. Sugar depresses the freezing point, which is what keeps ice cream scoopable. Allulose does this too. Most other substitutes do not, which is why they freeze hard.
Meringue. Sugar dissolving into egg white is what builds the structure. No substitute replicates this. Meringue needs real sugar.
Yeasted bread. Yeast eats sugar. Keep a small amount of real sugar or honey for the rise, then sweeten the rest however you like.
Caramel. Requires caramelisation. Allulose is the only substitute here that genuinely works.
Practical Notes
- Weigh rather than measure by volume where you can. Substitutes differ in density from sugar, so a cup of one is not the same weight as a cup of another.
- Blend high-intensity sweeteners into the dry ingredients before adding liquid, or you get uneven sweetness.
- Start at about 75% of your target sweetness and adjust up. Correcting over-sweet is much harder than adding more.
- Taste raw batter. With most substitutes, sweetness perception does not change dramatically during baking.
- Rare sugars and sugar alcohols can cause digestive discomfort in quantity, and tolerance varies between individuals. Worth keeping in mind if you are baking for others.
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Browse the full natural sweeteners range, packed in Australia and independently lab tested.