Sugar’s evolving role in Asian cuisine has many fans—and just as many haters.
In 2009, the Hong Kong–based chef Mak Kwai Pui did the unthinkable. He left a prestigious job as chef at Lung King Heen, a Cantonese fine-dining restaurant in the Four Seasons Hotel, and opened his own 20-seat dim sum canteen in Mong Kok, a working-class neighborhood of Kowloon, with co-chef Leung Fai Keung. Mak and Leung called their new restaurant Tim Ho Wan; among their most popular items was a baked pork bun with a shortcrust topping—a cross between a char siu bao and Hong Kong’s iconic bolo bao (also known as pineapple buns).
Pillowy fresh, with a modestly sweet pork filling, the buns were so good that they caught the eye of the Michelin Guide, and in 2010 Tim Ho Wan famously became the world’s most inexpensive restaurant to earn a Michelin star. Today the restaurant is a household name with over 80 locations across 10 countries (including the United States), thanks to an injection of private equity cash following its starry success. Last year, Tim Ho Wan was wholly acquired by the Jollibee Foods Corporation of, yes, Chickenjoy fame.
I used to visit Tim Ho Wan every time I went home to Hong Kong, specifically for those crackly pork buns. They were well-made, and, most important, the char siu filling was generous and not too sweet. The same buns at Tim Ho Wan in New York are far sweeter, presumably adjusted for the local palate. But in recent years, those pork buns in Hong Kong have been tasting more like dessert than a midafternoon snack. In other words, they’re sweeter than ever. I reached out to the restaurant to see if their recipe had been streamlined, but they didn’t respond to my request. So I turned to the next logical source: Reddit. There I stumbled upon a rumbling, albeit wholly anecdotal, murmur that certain beloved East Asian dishes—General Tso’s chicken, Korean tteokbokki—are now resoundingly sweeter than they used to be.
Those dishes and other favorites like Cantonese char siu and glazed Korean fried chicken have become global icons of their respective cuisines, prized for their sweet and savory flavors. But in some cases, sweetness is no longer just the supporting taste but the defining flavor. It wasn’t always this way, which raises the question: Which came first, the craving or the change?
First it’s helpful to establish a baseline of sweetness, which has played an important role in many East Asian cuisines for centuries. In the realm of savory cooking, sugar and other sweeteners are treated like a spice—one of many ingredients used to make food taste delicious. In Cantonese cuisine, for example, “sugar is used as a tool to achieve balance, mostly to deepen savoriness,” says cookbook author Hetty Lui McKinnon. Sugar is so integral to the cuisine that chef Calvin Eng of the Cantonese American restaurant Bonnie’s in Brooklyn recently published a cookbook titled Salt Sugar MSG. “It’s one of the most important trifectas of flavors in Cantonese cooking,” he notes.
Across Asia, a touch of sweetness is essential for the ability to shift and shape other flavors, but sugar is, in theory, not an ingredient that should stand out on its own. It is merely there to reign in a pungent fish sauce in Thai and Vietnamese sauces or to tamp down the spice of a Sichuan stir-fry. Even dessert is praised when its sweetness is muted or, as the popular phrase goes, “not too sweet.” “The pursuit of flavour has resulted more often in the blending of flavours,” write Lin Hsiang Ju and Lin Tsui Feng in their distinctive 1969 book Chinese Gastronomy. This philosophy of balance and equilibrium exists in kitchens across the region, from the five key flavors of Thai cuisine to the Japanese concept of gomi.
Sweetness may be indispensable, but it didn’t always come from cane sugar or even from its more acceptable derivatives like rock and unrefined raw sugar. In Asia, indigenous ingredients like honey, glutinous rice, grain syrups, and fruit historically added nuance and character to a dish. In Korea, for example, pears and onions were the sole source of sweetness in a bulgogi marinade. “If you look at recipes from 50 or 80 years ago, nobody used sugar,” says Hooni Kim, the chef-owner of Korean restaurants Danji, Meju, and Little Banchan Shop in New York. As an imported ingredient, “sugar was really expensive, so they relied on fruits and vegetables,” he adds.
The cane plant is native to the Pacific island of New Guinea but has been growing in countries like India and the Philippines for more than two thousand years. For most of its history, cane sugar was a luxury product that only the wealthy could afford, and many went to great lengths to get it. In the book Sweetness and Power, Sidney Mintz famously depicts sugar as the currency of the world’s first global economy, minted through slavery in the Western world. A more recent book, The World of Sugar by Ulbe Bosma, reads like the other half of the story, detailing sugar cane’s role in the East, which was notably not supported by the slave trade and for many years existed as a complex network of farmer-owned operations. Until the mid-1800s, sugar served a mostly utilitarian purpose among the proletariat, either as a source of energy or as medicine.
Of course, cane sugar has a bittersweet history in Asia too. By the Age of Exploration in the fifteenth century, the sugar trade in Asia had attracted the interests of distant colonists and local entrepreneurs alike. Following Dutch occupation in the mid-1600s, Taiwan became the world’s largest sugar-exporting colony, and the regional cuisine of its sugar hub, Tainan, is still widely said to be sweeter today than those of other parts of the country. The Taikoo Sugar Refinery in Hong Kong was, in the 1880s, one of the world’s largest sugar plants, which no doubt benefited its British founders. Eventually steam power and improved steel technology transformed sugar from a subsistence crop to a global commodity. “In the nineteenth century sugar was what oil would become in the twentieth: a key commodity,” writes Bosma. With the invention of high-fructose corn syrup in the 1950s, sugar became cheaper and more readily available than ever—upping the sweetness for home cooks and restaurant chefs alike.
Those pork buns in Hong Kong have been tasting more like dessert than a midafternoon snack.
The commercialization of sugar in East Asia turned early players into economic powerhouses that still shape the food supply. In one prescient example, South Korea’s largest food manufacturer, CJ CheilJedang, was founded in 1953 as a sugar refinery. Today CJ is a multibillion-dollar behemoth that makes everything from bulgogi sauce to marine biodegradable plastic (CJ owns brands like Bibigo and Beksul). With inexpensive sweeteners in their arsenals, big companies could produce a lot of food quickly, and make it shelf-stable and affordable. “Sweetening of food became commonplace in the emerging mass food industry, which gained the immense advantage of being considered as trusted and hygienic,” Bosma writes. Strapped for time, the modern consumer can’t help but buy into these practical and convenient foods, even if we are “unaware of the full extent of sugar’s presence,” as Bosma warns at the conclusion of his book.
A quick browse through any grocery store’s selection of processed foods will enlighten even the most blissfully ignorant. I recently visited my local H Mart and found that the top ingredient in nearly every paste, sauce, and condiment was some kind of sugar. This trend plays out across all packaged ingredients, Asian or not, as brands use sweetness to make their products more craveable and even addictive. On the one hand, it’s amazing that once-niche ingredients like red pepper paste or mapo tofu sauce are so widely available. On the other, what is scarified for this kind of scale?
Looking for Asian pantry ingredients without as much added sugar can lead one to specialty shops like the Japanese Pantry, Gotham Grove, and the Mala Market. One recent addition to the latter’s site is an oyster sauce from Fujian made with 75% oyster juice. It costs $18 compared to a three-dollar bottle of Lee Kum Kee sauce, but it offers the savory nuance of a more traditional recipe. “There is some sugar, but it’s not sweet, just totally balanced,” Mala Market owner Taylor Holliday says.
There is a time and a place for emphatic sweetness in savory foods, of course, and I believe that place is a restaurant. So did a generation of entrepreneurs from China, Korea, Vietnam, and Thailand who moved to America after 1965 and sold Westernized adaptations of their cuisines as a means to support their new lives in a new country. This led to the birth of cuisine subgenres like Cantonese American (see: orange chicken) and Korean American (see: bulgogi tacos), beloved in their own right but altogether separate—and sweeter. “It’s quite a departure from what we eat at home,” notes McKinnon. It’s no longer happening only here in the United States—in Korea, celebrity chef Baek Jong-won has earned a reputation for adding comical amounts of sugar to his savory recipes, like the popular noodle dish bibim guksu. Maybe the commercial success of Americanized cuisines is driving anyone looking for global influence to max out on sugar. Sweetness sells, after all.
In some cases, sweetness is no longer just the supporting taste but the defining flavor.
Still, catering to a global audience is like an act of translation where the source text risks losing its integrity or, worse, is rendered totally inaccurate. To chef Nicole Ponseca, of the Filipino restaurant Jeepney in Miami, the idea that Filipino cuisine is largely sweet is a gross mischaracterization. “It’s not a sweet cuisine,” she says. “Our base palate is what we call ‘asim,’ which is sour.” Filipino cuisine is as varied as the more than seven thousand islands that make up the archipelago, and yet commercial interests have distilled most of this variety into a handful of dishes, like Jollibee’s famously sweet spaghetti or Filipino barbecue, which is often marinated in soda. “It’s not even a little bit sweet, it goes from zero to one hundred,” Ponseca says. “And I think that misses the point of Filipino food.”
The great sweetification, as I’m now calling it, also panders to a Westernized ideal, which Ponseca identifies in the Philippines’ reverence for colonial influences, like Spanish baked breads or American processed foods like spam and ketchup. “That’s how many of us view the consumption of meat; it means we have money. I think the same thing could be said about sweetness,” she says. In this case, indulging in a sweet treat is not just about taste but is rooted in class and status, which is true across so much of Asia. “In Korea, we revere Western culture,” says Kim. From Manila to Hong Kong to Seoul, sweetness is driven as much by affordability as it is by the aspiration to be seen as modern and sophisticated.
To circle back to the original question, is this food really getting sweeter? Despite the convincing tirades on the internet, it’s hard to say definitively. But mass-produced and processed foods and beverages are certainly introducing more sugar into our diets. As a result, a taste for sweetness is growing. There are broad trends backed by data showing that sugar consumption is on the rise in Asia, not to mention sugar-related diseases like diabetes. According to one report, “developing countries account for approximately three-quarters of global sugar consumption,” and they are “expected to lead the future demand growth.”
Does all this mean we are marching toward some unassailably saccharine future, blanketed by the spiking satiation of sugar? If big business and other commercial interests like restaurants and global franchises have their way, the answer is probably yes. But if the universal flavor du jour is sweet, we lose the meditative delightfulness of balance. We’re entering an era where the highest compliment once reserved for dessert in many Asian households—that it’s not too sweet—might now apply to dinner.