- Season
- Available all year; a shelf-stable product with no season
- Price
- Low
- Nutrition per 100 g
- 0 kcal
- 0 g protein
- 0 g fat
- 0 g carbs
Sweetener
Baking ingredients
Sweetener
In a Czech shop, sladidlo means a tabletop sweetener: a sugar substitute with few or no calories, sold as small tablets in a dispenser, as liquid drops or as a granulated powder, for sweetening drinks and food in place of sugar. It does not mean sugar, honey or syrups.
In practice
How to store
- On the counter
Store tablets and powders closed, in a dry place at room temperature and away from steam and humidity. Damp tablets crumble and powders cake. Unopened, they keep until the best-before date, which is typically a year or more.
- In the fridge
Not needed for tablets or powders. Keep opened liquid sweetener tightly capped and follow the label. Most contain a preservative and keep at room temperature, but some makers recommend using them within a set time after opening.
- In the freezer
Not recommended and not needed. Freezing gives no benefit, and condensation can damage tablets and powders.
How to choose
Choose the format by use. Tablets in a pocket dispenser (e.g. Fan, Kandisin, DiaChrom) are made for tea and coffee, and one tablet usually matches one sugar cube or one teaspoon of sugar. Liquid sweeteners (e.g. Kandisin tekutý) dose easily into cold drinks, compotes, creams and doughs, and the label gives an equivalence such as 8 drops to 1 teaspoon of sugar. Granulated erythritol–stevia blends (e.g. Natusweet Kristalle 1:1) replace sugar by volume in baking and sprinkling. Read the line "stolní sladidlo na bázi…" to see what is inside. If you will bake with it, pick a heat-stable base: saccharin, cyclamate, acesulfame K, sucralose, steviol glycosides or erythritol. Aspartame-only products lose sweetness when heated for a long time. Check the best-before date and make sure the dispenser or bottle seal is intact.
What to swap in
Best swap
Another tabletop sweetener with a similar base. Swap tablets for tablets or drops for drops, using the equivalence printed on each pack. For baking, a granulated erythritol–stevia blend measured 1:1 for sugar is the easiest swap.
In a pinch
Ordinary sugar (cukr krupice or moučka). One tablet roughly equals one cube or one teaspoon of sugar (4–6 g), but this adds energy and sugars, which may matter if you use sweetener for dietary reasons.
Preparation
No preparation is needed. Drop tablets into hot drinks and stir until dissolved. In cold drinks they dissolve slowly, so crush them or use the liquid form. Add liquid sweeteners drop by drop and taste as you go, because overdosing makes the bitter aftertaste stronger. In baking, remember that intense sweeteners give sweetness only. They do not supply sugar's bulk, moisture, browning, crisping or food for yeast, so a recipe may need extra volume (e.g. more fruit, dairy or eggs) or a 1:1 granulated blend. Follow the maker's conversion chart instead of swapping sugar weight for weight.
Don't toss it
Tablets that have crumbled from damp still work. Dissolve them in a little warm water to make a quick liquid sweetener for that week's tea, lemonade or fruit compote. Empty plastic dispensers from tablet brands can usually go in the yellow plastics bin; check the local sorting rules.
In the kitchen
Cooking
Tabletop sweeteners are used mostly cold or dissolved: in hot drinks, homemade lemonades and syrups, compotes, fruit salads, quark (tvaroh) and yoghurt desserts, cream fillings and porridge. Heat-stable bases such as saccharin, cyclamate, sucralose, acesulfame K, stevia and erythritol work in cooked compotes, preserves meant for the fridge and some baking. Without sugar's bulk, cakes come out flatter, paler and drier. Sugar-free jams and fruit preserves also lack sugar's preserving effect, so they must be kept in the fridge and eaten quickly. Erythritol does not caramelise and can recrystallise in chilled creams. Aspartame is best added after cooking.
Goes well with
- Black Tea
- Coffee
- Lemon
- Fruit Compote
- Tvaroh
- White Yoghurt
- Rhubarb
- Sour Cherries
- Cocoa
- Vanilla
- Cinnamon
- Muesli
What it is
In a Czech shop, sladidlo means a tabletop sweetener: a sugar substitute with few or no calories, sold as small tablets in a dispenser, as liquid drops or as a granulated powder, for sweetening drinks and food in place of sugar. It does not mean sugar, honey or syrups. Most products are built on high-intensity sweeteners such as saccharin, cyclamate, aspartame, acesulfame K, sucralose or steviol glycosides from stevia, or on the bulk polyol erythritol, often blended with one another. Czech retailers group them as "umělá sladidla" or "náhradní sladidla", and they are sold in supermarkets, pharmacies and the "dia" sections of grocery websites. Under EU additives law every such product must be labelled "stolní sladidlo na bázi…" ("table-top sweetener based on…"), followed by the names of the sweeteners it contains.
How it tastes
Tabletop sweeteners give sweetness without the body, browning or caramel notes of sugar. Saccharin is strongly sweet and leaves a slightly metallic, bitter finish, especially at high doses. Cyclamate is milder and rounder, which is why it is so often blended with saccharin, as in classic Czech liquid sweeteners. Aspartame and sucralose taste closest to sugar, with a lingering sweetness. Steviol glycosides can have a liquorice-like, slightly bitter aftertaste. Erythritol granules are less sweet than sugar and feel cool on the tongue.
Common questions
How many sweetener tablets replace a teaspoon of sugar?
Can I bake with sladidlo?
What does "stolní sladidlo na bázi…" on the label mean?
Why does my sweetener say it contains a source of phenylalanine?
Are erythritol and xylitol sweeteners safe around pets?
Deep dive
3 min read
Varieties
Saccharin tablets (sacharin)
— the oldest type, strongly sweet with a slightly metallic aftertaste and stable in heat. The Fan saccharin tablets sold in Czech shops are a typical example.
Cyclamate–saccharin blends
— the classic Czech liquid and tablet sweetener (e.g. Kandisin). The two sweeteners mask each other's off-notes. They are heat-stable and suited to cooking and baking.
Aspartame and aspartame–acesulfame tablets
— taste close to sugar and are popular in coffee (e.g. DiaChrom, Fan aspartam-acesulfam). They must state that they contain a source of phenylalanine. They are less suited to long baking.
Sucralose sweeteners
— tablets, drops and granules. Very sweet, close to sugar in taste and stable in heat.
Stevia sweeteners (steviol glycosides, E 960a)
— tablets, drops or granules made from purified extracts of the stevia plant (e.g. Kandisin Stevia, Natusweet). They are often bulked with erythritol.
Granulated polyol sweeteners
— erythritol (E 968) on its own or with stevia, sold as 1:1 "sugar-like" crystals for baking. Xylitol (birch sugar, E 967) is sold alongside them. These count as sweeteners, but they are bulk ingredients rather than intense ones.
Relatives that are different products: sugar, honey, agave and maple syrups, and fruit syrups are not "sladidlo" in the Czech retail sense. They appear in other catalogue entries.
History
Saccharin, discovered in 1879, was the first synthetic sweetener and became widespread as a sugar substitute during the sugar shortages of the two world wars. Cyclamate (1937) and aspartame (1965) followed, then acesulfame K and sucralose. In Czechoslovakia, tablet and liquid sweeteners were long sold mainly in pharmacies for diabetic diets, which is why pharmacy chains still carry large ranges today. Steviol glycosides became an authorised sweetener in the EU in 2011, and erythritol–stevia blends have since become common on Czech shelves.
Science
High-intensity sweeteners activate the tongue's sweet-taste receptors at tiny concentrations. Depending on the compound, they are about 30–50 (cyclamate), around 200 (aspartame, acesulfame K), around 300–500 (saccharin) or about 600 (sucralose) times sweeter than sucrose. So a tablet weighing a fraction of a gram matches a teaspoon of sugar, and fillers such as sodium bicarbonate or lactose make up most of its mass. Lactose fillers matter for people avoiding milk sugar, so check the ingredients. Aspartame is a dipeptide that breaks down with prolonged heat and in acidic liquids over time, losing sweetness. Erythritol is a sugar alcohol about 60–70 % as sweet as sugar. It dissolves with a cooling effect (it absorbs heat) and is not fermented by baker's yeast. None of these sweeteners take part in Maillard browning or caramelisation the way sucrose does.
Sourcing and ethics
In the EU, every sweetener is a food additive with an E-number, authorised under Regulation (EC) No 1333/2008 after a safety assessment by EFSA, which sets an acceptable daily intake for each. The regulation also sets labelling rules for table-top sweeteners: the "based on…" name, the phenylalanine statement for aspartame and the laxative-effect warning for polyols. Synthetic sweeteners are made industrially. Stevia extracts come from cultivated Stevia rebaudiana, grown largely in South America and Asia, and erythritol is usually made by fermenting glucose. Food-safety caution: xylitol, and products containing it, are highly toxic to dogs, so keep them out of pets' reach. People with phenylketonuria must avoid aspartame.