With Holy Week come the typical sweets of this time. Who can resist some delicious torrijas ? The problem with this rich tradition is, as always, the ingredients with which they are made. Torrijas are a dessert that has a lot of sugar and, therefore, it is impossible for diabetics or people who need to reduce or eliminate that amount of sugar in the body.
Surely you already know that diabetes patients have a pathology characterized by having very high levels of sugar (glucose) in the blood. This means that they need to thoroughly control the levels, especially so that they do not cause major problems.
So what happens to diabetes sufferers? Shouldn’t you try the torrijas? A normal recipe for this dessert contains a lot of sugar and the answer would be no. However, today we have numerous adapted recipes that allow us to enjoy desserts like this adapted to each of our needs we have. For this reason, we are going to give you a very special Easter recipe: how to make sugar-free French toast for diabetics. You will love them!
Sugar-free French toast recipe
Ingredients
– Hard bread or special French toast bread
– 1 liter of milk
– Lemon and orange peel
– Cinnamon stick and powder
– 1 egg
– Sweetener (saccharin, stevia, splenda…)
Step by Step
+Put the milk, the sweetener, the lemon and orange peel , as well as the cinnamon stick in a saucepan. Be careful when adding the skins, because it does not matter if there is too much white skin because, in this way, it will taste much more bitter.
+Put everything on medium heat and let it boil for 15 minutes . Meanwhile, cut the loaf into slices about one and a half fingers thick. If you make them too thin they could break, and if you go too thick they won’t soak well.
+When you have the milk mixture ready, spread the slices on a tray and pour it on top, making them soak well.
+Egg paint the slices to bake for 15 minutes (or a little more, depending on the oven) at 180º. After this time and seeing that the slices are golden, turn them over and repeat the process on the other side: paint with egg and place in the oven.
+Remove the French toast from the tray while they are still hot and sprinkle with cinnamon and the sweetener that we have used. Thus, we will have achieved a recipe for traditional French toast with much less calories and suitable for diabetics.
Where does the tradition of torrijas come from?
To find the reason why torrijas are traditionally consumed, we must go back to the fifteenth century. At that time, pieces of stale bread, eggs and sugar began to be used so that women could recover as soon as possible after giving birth. This postpartum help was always accompanied by a glass of wine, as a general rule. However, why do they begin to be consumed during Easter and Lent ?
Some say that it is a need to dispose of the hard and leftover bread that could accumulate during Lent. But there are other traditions that go much further and seek an exact meaning for the consumption of French toast during this time of year.
Of the days of penance that must be done during Lent (40 days that Jesus fasted in the desert) a recipe should be sought that would help fill the stomach and at the same time respect abstinence , such as eating meat. For this reason, many nuns resorted to dipping that leftover hard bread in milk and honey, and from there the French toast recipes began to be born .