It looks like concentrated evil, but it tastes pretty good: my attempt at making Charles's brownies. What's interesting is how you can see the spatula pattern from my attempts to tamp the brownie batter down into all four corners of the baking pan. Why are the corners rounded? I guess I folded the parchment paper a little too tightly at the corners.
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| I'm surprised at how many chocolate chips made it through the process more or less whole. |
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| You see that I've ripped away most of the parchment paper. |
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| A glossy-looking closeup. I guess it's hard, with such brownies, to get that signature crust on top. |
It could simply be that I made a mistake somewhere along the line, but as you see, this brownie has no crust on top. It may be possible to make them so that you have a crust, but this is something I'll explore later.
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| two pieces liberated from the main bulk |
To be clear, if any mistakes were made, they were mine. That said, I'd rate these brownies as pretty good, especially for people who like their brownies to be heavy, gooey, and almost like chocolate fudge. I'm not totally in that camp: I prefer my brownies to be a bit cakier, but if you were to hand me a brownie that looks, feels, smells, and tastes like one from the batch I just made, I'd eat it without hesitation. In fact, I'm going to eat a few more pieces Sunday afternoon before I share the rest with my crew.
In terms of the sugar I used: I didn't want to go with confectioner's erythritol (even though I have it) because I'm not a fan of that "cool" feeling you get when consuming erythritol in certain foods. I don't notice that feeling when, for example, I use erythritol to sweeten up some yogurt and fruit, and I don't sense it when I make tea, but as I discovered with that second batch of cookies I made, the erythritol comes through loud and clear in some desserts, and I just didn't want it in these brownies.
With that as background, I can now talk about the two types of sweetener I used: Truvia and Swerve. Truvia has, I think, a bit of actual sugar in it, but the nutrition label says the sweetener has only 2 g of net carbs per serving (net carbs = total carbs - fiber - sugar alcohol). I can live with that. Truvia is made with Stevia, a sweetener I normally can't stand in its concentrated form, but which seems to work in artificial brown sugar. The other faux brown sugar was Swerve which, if you sample it, you can tell right away is made with erythritol. I used about a 70-30 Truvia/Swerve combination for these brownies because I wanted to use up the rest of my bag of Truvia, and my Swerve was next in line to be used. Despite the combination of sweeteners, I didn't notice any "cooling" effect when I sampled my work. In the future, though, I'll be buying only Truvia as my brown-sugar substitute: I like it a lot better than Swerve for baking purposes. I'm learning as I go.
I also didn't use my recently acquired Lily's chocolate chips: as I mentioned in a previous post, those chips also have erythritol as their sweetener, and you can taste/feel it when you bite into the cookies from my second batch. I've never been put off by erythritol's effect before, but for some reason, its presence in these cookies bothers me. So for the brownies, I went back to Ghirardelli dark chocolate. A recent video I watched talked about how even 72% dark chocolate can provoke a marked insulin spike, so dark chocolate might not be the solution that keto-heads think it is. Still, with the brownie being loaded up with artificial sweeteners and made with almond flour instead of regular flour, the per-serving carb count is going to be significantly lower than for regular brownies even if the chips being used are non-keto. So no pangs of conscience here.
Charles's recipe called for soy milk, which is actually not considered keto by some experts because it has various problems (although that may depend on the brand). The grocery in my apartment building is currently out of the usual in-carton soy milk that it normally carries, so after a bit of searching at the local SSG Food Market, I found some soy-milk brand that uses little-kiddie cartons and bought maybe four containers (in truth, I needed only one of them). As for the other recipe ingredients—I had everything else at home already.
Charles's recipe suggests using an immersion blender to achieve a proper emulsion of the sweetener, soy milk, and oil. I used a hand mixer instead, so the emulsion wasn't quite there (I also used the blender on low speed because it was after midnight... I suppose I could have waited to put the brownies together late Sunday morning or sometime in the afternoon, but I was impatient). Nevertheless, I think, overall, the brownie batter came together about the way Charles's recipe said it would, and then it was a matter of glopping the batter into a baking pan and spreading it from edge to edge.
The baked brownie square came out hot and exceedingly soft, so I left it to cool down under my air conditioner for a while before I ventured to cut off a chunk to eat. The brownie certainly smelled good, and even after waiting the better part of an hour, the brownie was heavy, moist, and gooey without being fragile. Nobody seriously expects a brownie to be light and fluffy, right? The brownie did look remarkably evil, but that's the nature of brownies.
Taste-wise, the brownie will definitely be a hit for chocolate-lovers. Unfortunately, I don't think either of the people I work with is into sweets, which is sad news. I expect my boss and my coworker to eat maybe one piece of the brownie and call it quits. I might try offering any leftovers to whoever else is in my office (our branch has emptied out in recent months; it's pretty quiet where we work now), but I won't be averse to surreptitiously eating whatever's left over myself. Slowly, I mean. That's a lot of chocolate, even for me.
Charles's recipe—sent this past May 23—is, I think, an improvement upon, a revision of, or simply a low-carb version of a recipe he'd sent on February 23. That recipe used regular white sugar, all-purpose flour, and 80 g of butter. Overall, I'd rate this new recipe a success. I remember the first time I ever ate a so-called "flourless chocolate cake" in northern Virginia; I recall finding the concept of "flourless cake" fascinating, but I now know it's not a huge deal: there are many ways to achieve bread-like, cake-like, and brownie-like textures without resorting to regular wheat flour. I'm not saying Charles's brownie is not a huge deal, but I am saying I'm more familiar with the idea of not using regular flour in baking.
I'll be curious to see how the brownies taste Sunday afternoon.
4 comments:
Yes, these are definitely fudgy brownies, not cakey brownies--my original recipe, with flour, butter, and egg, is more cakey. But to be honest I think I might like these even more in terms of texture. I think I would have to do two batches side by side to be sure, but that seems like a lot of faff (not to mention a lot of brownies).
As for the crust, no, you did not do anything wrong--these brownies do not have the typical shiny crust. In fact, my original recipe doesn't have the crust, either. When I first started making brownies I did a lot of research into what produces the shiny crust and got a lot of conflicting information. Many people say it has to do with dissolving the sugar in melted butter, and I tried that method but got no love. I then found someone who swore it was the addition of chocolate chips, so I tried adding chocolate chips. That did nothing in terms of the crust, but it did make the brownies more chocolatey (obviously), so I kept the chips. Eventually I decided that I didn't really care about the crust as long as the brownies tasted good. I suspect that if you want the shiny crust you're going to have to use a lot more sugar than I am willing to use in a recipe.
As for the brownies being a huge deal, they most certainly are not. But people seem to like them. They're not the best brownies I've ever had, but they are mine, and that's enough.
Incidentally, the use of the soy milk was not originally a keto thing, but a vegetarian thing. Same with the almond flour, which was introduced to get around gluten intolerance. Don't remember if I mentioned that. Anyway, the point is that you could probably mix and match the two recipes if you just wanted to focus on keto--maybe use the original recipe but substitute almond flour for the wheat flour. I imagine those might end up being a little more cakey than fudgy.
Adam Ragusea has a video about how to get crust on brownies.
Could you swap out the soy milk with almond milk or some other milk alternative?
I think the brownies were even firmer when I tried them this afternoon.
All in all, a really good recipe. Thanks for passing it along. (I might use the stick blender next time.)
I don't care enough about getting a crust on my brownies to watch a video on it, especially when the "secret" could probably be revealed in a sentence or two of text. But if you want to experiment, I'll be in the stands cheering you on. (To be honest, I think I'd actually rather not get little flakes of crust all over the place when eating my brownies. Blasphemy, I know.)
You can't really sub in other milk alternatives for this particular recipe, as it is the lecithin in the soy milk that allows the oil to emulsify. I suppose you could try aquafaba (the water leftover after cooking chickpeas), as that is supposed to work as well. I doubt it's keto-friendly, though. I mean, the recipe will still work with another milk alternative, but you won't get that emulsion, and I think that is key for the proper texture (which is why, yeah, I think you should definitely try the stick blender next time).
Keep in mind that this is a very non-standard brownie recipe--most brownie recipes I've seen use melted butter with no emulsion. In fact, this might not even be a brownie recipe--it might be more of a "fudge bar." So you may want to experiment with various ingredients and techniques and see what happens. As long as you're using ingredients that can be eaten raw (so, no eggs or wheat flour, etc.), technically you can't go wrong, and anything you produce will at least be edible. I think it all comes down to finding out what the best techniques are for achieving the texture that you want.
I think I'd agree with the "fudge bar" assessment, but you've got chef Brian Lagerstrom in your corner on that one. In the choice between cakey and fudgey, Lagerstrom leans fudgey. I'd link you to his brownie video, but that would just give you another chance to reject the links I offer, and I can take only so much rejection before I become suicidal. Speaking of which:
I don't care enough about getting a crust on my brownies to watch a video on it, especially when the "secret" could probably be revealed in a sentence or two of text.
You haughty, saucy thing! For what it's worth, Ragusea does lay out the problem within the first twenty seconds of the video (the need to get sugar well dissolved in and dispersed throughout the batter), but the rest of the video is devoted to the science of that and to complicating factors. He, too, concludes that confectioner's sugar is the way to go.
I have to wonder, though, how much that applies to artificial sweeteners. I saw pics of so-called "keto brownies" that had crusts, but that's something I'll research for myself since a crust isn't important to you.
And yes, I'll go for the stick blender next time. With the hand mixer, I got things about 90% emulsified, but there was that annoying, thin remnant of oil even after several minutes of blending. The oil mixed into the batter just fine with the introduction of the rest of the ingredients, so I don't think the lack of a full emulsion was totally tragic, but I'll shoot for a full emulsion next time. Better and better.
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