When you're making sweeteners from fruit, it helps to know which fruits are sweetest and which are on the low end of the sugar curve. Grapes are the sweetest, at about 18 percent sugar, ripe bananas come in at over 15 percent, sweet cherries are 14.6 percent, apples are 13.3 percent, and pears are 10.5 percent. Those are the best fruits to start with in the recipes below.

Here are six ways to use the high sugar content of fruit to your advantage:

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If you're baking a pie or something that uses fruit as a main ingredient, use a sweeter fruit, rather than white sugar, to boost its sweetness. For instance, try slicing some sweet apples, grapes, or a mashed overripe banana in with berries when baking pies or crumbles.

Related: The 5 Worst Sweeteners You Should Avoid

Just a little cooking and mashing or blending turns apples into applesauce, which you can use to replace at least some of the white sugar in breads, brownies, muffins, or other baked goods. Most fruits can be made into sauce by removing seeds or pits, simmering until soft in a small amount of water or juice, and either pureeing the result in a blender or mashing it by hand until it is as smooth as desired. Replace up to half the sugar with fruit sauce and reduce the other liquids by 2/3 as much.

Simmer your fruit even longer, and it will get sweeter and thicker as more of the water cooks off. Eventually, you wind up with fruit butter. While a huge variety of fruit butters are available commercially, most contain added white sugar. Making your own from fresh organic fruit allows you to avoid that. Apple butter is the most common type, but you can make fruit butter from any fruit, whether fresh—grapes or pears—or dried—raisins, dried dates, prunes, or dried apples. Simmer dried fruit in a little water or fruit juice and blend until smooth. The benefit to using dried fruit is that it has a higher sugar content than fresh and can be as much as 70 percent sugar. You can replace all of the sugar with a really thick butter and reduce the other liquids by 1/3 the amount.

Get your sweet fix without all the sugar by making this chia berry jam:

Because it is so sweet, dried fruit on its own is a great way to sweeten up a fruit salad, baked goods, or even spaghetti sauce, without adding any extra steps. But some commercially available dried fruits have added sugar, so read ingredient lists. Or make your own in a dehydrator. If you need to chop larger pieces of stickier dried fruits—figs or dried dates, for instance—first toss them in some of the flour that will go into the recipe (for baking) or "grease" your knife with vegetable oil, or cut them using kitchen shears dipped frequently in cold water.

Related: 7 Reasons To Ditch Dangerous Artificial Sweeteners

When you use freeze-dried fruit as a sweetener, you don't have to adjust the recipe as you would for a wetter product, and you can substitute it for sugar in a one-to-one ratio, unlike the other fruit-based sweeteners I've included. You can buy powdered freeze-dried fruit, which is super easy to add to all sorts of foods and beverages—just be sure to keep the container tightly closed to keep it dry until you use it or it will turn into a solid block as it soaks up moisture from the air—or you can make your own!

Related: 3 No-Cook Freezer Jam Recipes

While making freeze-dried fruit requires expensive equipment not available to the home cook, a regular blender can handle a basic recipe. I experimented with bananas and yellow raisins, but you could make it with any fruit you like. However, fruits with lower sugar content—think bananas and apples—are easier to work with, as they get very dry and don't stick as much as sweeter fruits do. The bananas were very easy to make into powder and very sweet. The yellow raisins were a bit harder, as raisins are whole fruits with intact skins and it is hard to get them really dry.

My recipe for freeze-dried fruit powder:

Cut fresh fruit into ¼" slices or chop dried fruit roughly and dry it in a dehydrator or the oven with the door open a crack (my old gas oven will maintain a perfect 140°F temperature on its lowest setting) until the pieces are so dry they snap rather than bend. Place the over-dried fruit in an open dish in the freezer for a couple of hours until it is frozen hard.

When you're ready to create your powder, get your blender out and have a jar with a tight lid ready to put the finished powder into. Take about ¼ cup of frozen fruit out and leave the rest in the freezer. Blend until pulverized, quickly empty the powder into the jar, and pop the jar into the freezer. Speed is especially important— delay, and the powder will fuse into a block. Repeat until all your frozen fruit has been processed. Seal the jar and store it in the freezer to keep the powder from getting sticky.

Related: This Crustless Slow Cooker Pumpkin Pie Is The Easiest Dessert You'll Make All Fall

The resulting product resembles brown sugar in texture when it warms up and can be used in any recipe that calls for brown sugar. Your freeze-dried fruit is also marvelous for adding concentrated flavor to all sorts of beverages and foods. Try it with not only fruits but veggies as well!

On their own, 100-percent fruit juices (check the labels; most fruit juices on the market have tons of added sugar) are best for sweetening drinks and sauces, but will water down baked goods or pies. But if you boil them down to about 1/3 to ¼ of the original volume, you wind up with a concentrate the consistency of honey that you can add to anything you like, from making drinks to topping breads or even topping pancakes. In fact, apple cider syrup or "boiled cider" used to be the go-to sweetener for people all along the Eastern Seaboard until the 1940s, when it got knocked off its pedestal by cheaper cane sugar.

My favorite way to make fruit concentrates is to start with homemade fruit nectar and leave all the fiber and nutritional goodness from the fruit intact. Here's a simple recipe for peach nectar, though you could use any fruit you like: Wash 1 pound of peaches; peel (if you have a powerful blender you can leave the skin on, which is the most nutritious part of the fruit), remove the pits, and cut into chunks. Place in a heavy-bottomed saucepan with 1 to 2 cups of water and simmer until the fruit is very soft. Blend until very smooth.

To make a concentrate, place the nectar in a heavy-bottomed saucepan and simmer it slowly until it is reduced to about 1/3 to ¼ of the original volume. Keep the heat very low and stir frequently (the thicker it gets the more prone it is to sticking and scorching).

To substitute fruit concentrate in recipes, use 2/3 cup of concentrate for each cup of sugar called for and reduce the amount of other liquids by 1/3. Add ¼ teaspoon baking soda per cup of concentrate in baked goods will help them rise. Just be sure to reduce any salt your recipe calls for by the same amount to correct the flavor.