Both will work but here is something with more detail: https://www.seriouseats.com/2018/02/make-better-brownies-with-brown-butter-and-double-the-chocolate.html
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Ridiculously easy, fudgey brownies…
- 350g Nutella
- 2 large eggs
- 65g plain flour
- ½ tsp baking powder
Warm the Nutella so it becomes slack and stir in the other ingredients until smooth. Pour the batter into a liner or greased 20cm square tin and bake in a 180C oven (170C fan) for 20 minutes if you like barely set brownies up to 30 minutes if you prefer them more like cake.
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Butter is around 20% water. Where as oil, lard, shortening is 100% far. That’s got an impact, and its apparently why many brownie mixes call for oil. There’s not much bleck to it, neutral fat is neutral. But I have seen too much oil do some weird shit to boxed mixes. Sort of like geasey fried brownie brittle. So I wouldn’t go dumping oil in willy nilly.
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Next time try not to use a boxed mix 
seriously… Doesn’t take that much extra effort to make better baked goods
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Use the recipe for Katherine Hepburn’s Brownies . You can use either cocoa powder ( I use Hershey’s ) or chocolate . As long as you don’t over bake fudgy heaven . Search Katherine Hepburn’s Brownie recipe .
I’m reminded of a conversation with a friend recently returned from living in US, who observed that USians seem to use box mixes for every sort of cake / baked goods, and how relatively few seemed to bake from scratch. Probably just the circles they moved in, but it does seem that box mixes are far more likely to be the first resort there than here in UK. Or maybe it’s just the circles I move in. But we don’t see shelves chock full of them in the supermarkets here, compared to what I observed last time I was over there.
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They just ran a newly-updated version of the Good Eats episode containing a recipe for brownies:
I might just have to fire up the oven today…
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I’m all for shortening and lard. I’m only against canola because I’m one of the people who can taste canola, and it tastes sooooo strong like plastic or poison, hard to describe. most people say it has no flavor or is very neutral, but if you are one of the people who can taste it, it can wreck anything it touches for you.
Almost everyone can taste those flavors in the non-hexane extracted raw canola oil, that stuff is nasty nasty nasty, but only some people can taste it in regular refined canola. not sure why? maybe it is like cilantro or papaya where some people genetically have a difference that changes how they taste it? whatever the case canola is the worst to my tastes, i can’t stand it. i don’t have any issue with the tastes of corn oil or soy oil, but keep that canola away from me. lol. it is a personal strong opinion. 
and yes, an aversion to canola really does affect a lot of boxed foods, fast foods, etc. i can usually tell from the smell when i walk into a restaurant if they use canola. right away the entire place will wreak to me if they do, i can almost taste the air. boxed foods i typically check before i buy because they are sealed.
My family is from Venezuela so we definitely try to make everything from scratch, or as close to it as possible… i hate pre-packed ready to go food. One of my pet peeves is people making pancakes or waffles from a mix. They’re the easiest things to make and don’t take a lot of ingredients, and take maybe 2-3 minutes to do from scratch (not counting cooking time). And to me what really annoys me is people that make birthday cakes from a mix, to me that’s insulting… if you’re not going care enough to buy a nice cake or make one yourself just don’t bother. Doesn’t have to be the best thing ever but put in the effort.
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I honestly don’t like canola for cooking anyway. There are cheaper oils with higher smoke point. But that’s interesting.
I spent 20 years bouncing in and out of the restaurant business. And I never saw canola anywhere. Except maybe in mixed “liquid shortning” or “cream” frying oils meant to mimic animal fats. Those tend to contain some canola.
Olive oil, corn, peanut are all default oils. I’m suspecting the stinky places are filling their fryers with blended oils. It does tend to be cheaper.
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Even that can be fraught with danger. When I lived in Chicago, I tried picking up a Key Lime pie for a summertime barbecue at my dad’s. I got it from a Mexican bakery, only to serve it and find out it was full of alternate ingredients and tasted god-awful. So bad we chucked it into the trash.
I live in Tijuana, and should point out there are generally two types of Mexican bakeries…those who really use butter and those who put lard in everything to cut costs. You often don’t find out which until you take a bite.
Undercook them.
Seriously, that’s it.
If you overcook them they get more biscuity and will go hard/stale faster. However they taste awesome and go fudgey again when served with chocolate custard; add a spoon of good cocoa to a powder mix custard like Bird’s and realise what your life has been missing.
In their defense it’s often not a case of cutting costs. Mexican baking is heavily reliant on lard. Most genuinely south and central American baked goods use lard, not shortening, butter, or oil. Even where they’re adaptations of European baked goods.
So in my experience those places that narrowly focus on an ethnic/local market and only make gringo cakes as an afterthought. Or places that are just not very good. Just kind of don’t adapt. They apply their own quisine’s baking defaults lazily to things where it doesn’t work.
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If you don’t have unsalted butter* on hand for shortening, you can use minimally processed coconut oil. It helps if you like coconut oil. I love coconut oil brownies, and I use this:
I often use the Bob’s Red Mill gluten-free brownie mix because if I want to eat brownies they must not contain (my migraine-triggering) wheat:
I bake in Pyrex, at 25 degrees (F) lower than the recommended baking temperature. Sometimes even lower temps than that. This makes the baking time longer. Keep testing the center of the brownies with a clean bamboo skewer, or thin knife, etc. Testing for doneness in brownies does not mean the skewer or whatever comes out perfectly clean. You want a wee bit of goo adhering to the stick–like 2mm.
Pull the pan from the oven immediately. Cool pan with brownies in it on a wire rack.
If possible, as soon as the brownies are cooled enough to cut, store them in an air-tight container. Store at room temperature for < 3 days. Putting them in the fridge dries them out a bit, even in the air-tight container.
Concur with multiple posters re: using fewer eggs and more fat results in a less cake-y more fudge-y brownie.
Concur that using duck eggs make for a richer result than using chicken eggs, and no it doesn’t taste gamey or ducky. I have tasted duck egg brownies and they were very good.
Concur with another poster that limiting water in the recipe is useful, and that butter has water in it. Different butters (brands, even lot numbers within a single brand) have different water amounts.
Concur that chocolate and canola oil should never go together. How can anyone do such a thing to chocolate? Is nothing sacred any more?!?!?
In my experience, slower lower baking prevents burning, promotes fudginess, but doesn’t make a super crispy edge.
I have not used and am not advocating these brownies recipes per se but I do respect the methodology and testing from the good folks at Cook’s Illustrated. They explain the science of cooking/baking in clear direct language. The conflicting info you speak of may be resolved by a better explanation entombed somewhere on their site.
There should be an uncrumbed, glistening, heavy line in middle of the cut on those brownies. Lower that temperature, friend, by at least 25 degrees F, maybe a tad lower than that. Increase your baking time, and do not bake to the point where the center of the brownies have a massive crack in it. That’s too much heat for too long until you get the recipe sorted. More research is needed!
Hope you have a cooperative oven with a digital temperature control.
*It is well-known in food industry (I was in it for a decade) that the dairy companies will salt "older" butter to mask any possible rancidity. The freshest sweetest butter is unsalted, and it is the better one to bake with because you can control the salt content in your recipe. So that's one variable sorted among the many that go into the final product.
Disclosure: I have no financial interest in VitaCost. They just have fresh, reliable quality and are low cost, and they ship to most places in the U.S.
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I increasingly don’t, after a decade as a subscriber. I’ve seen them disproved, and corrected too many times. While they continue to publish information that’s incorrect, and some how “discover” and “invent” the same methods via the same testing every 3 years or so. A lot of their “testing” involves using obviously bad technique to “discover” a well known or traditional method. Or something developed and popularized elsewhere/ And an increasing number of their recipes are rehashes of work done elsewhere with a few tweaks to make the recipe “an easy week night meal”. Which if you’ve tried the recipes, they never are. I’ve noticed most issues I’ve received in the last 2 years contain at least one carbon copy of a recipe from The Food Lab. Often times something recently published by Serious East. Nearly ingredient for ingredient, step by step.
And oddly even though my subscription was up nearly a year ago, and I did not re-subscribe. Issues still show up, along with an ever increasing number of “special offer” and “last chance” envelopes asking me to renew.
Which is not surprising. Every issue has always been loaded with prompts for different subscription packages. Subscriptions to the other magazine (Cooks Country), and to subscribe to the web sites. Binding services for your back issues. And the cook books. Which are the same recipes you already have, organized in different over lapping groupings, rather than anything complete or organized sensibly. Nearly every article dead-ends in a prompt to follow up in Cooks Country, which you can subscribe to for $x. Or a URL for one of the websites. Which if you type in, requires you to pay up for an additional subscription.
Those recipes you linked to? Pay walled. And more annoyingly they have three different websites. Websites are not included with the magazine subscription. And membership for one website doesn’t cross over with the others. So its $35 /year/site. Unless you act now! You can get special all access weebldy wobbldy for just $69.99!
If you want everything to work as it should. To access all of it, and the complete version of the articles you’ve subscribed to. You need to pay up for 2 magazines, and 3 websites. And even from the one magazine its easy to tell how much time they spend simply rotating old material in and out of publication.
Its a very, very strange company. It’s like the Cutco of food writing.
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Thanks for all your feedback. I agree with you about much. And yeah I find their paywall annoying.
I am seriously interested in hearing your opinion of
… because I have mixed opinions of them.
For a while I found Alton Brown’s recipes interesting, yet not so applicable or useful to my own food intake.
He did focus on technique and science-y foodie stuff on his shows.
I need to go check Food Lab! Thanks.
One more question please and thank you… do you read any Felicity Cloake over at The Guardian?
Her brownie recipe:
Technique
Devotees of the soft and fudgey school of brownie often advocate ripping them untimely from the oven in order to devour the “warm goo” in the centre that is apparently “one of life’s greatest pleasures”.
Just before you take your brownies out of the oven, pour an inch of cold water into a roasting tin, and tip in as many ice cubes as you can find in the freezer (if you’re as disorganised as me, you’ll be reassured to know that wine coolers also work well here) – then, as soon as they’re done to your satisfaction, plunge the tin into its chilly bath. This stops the mixture cooking almost immediately, and gives you a nice ■■■■■ centre, without the claggy denseness of underdone flour.
If yes on Felicity Cloake, are you willing to share your opinion?
ETA: typos
Sheesh there are people out there adding double cream to a brownie recipe?
I think I gotta go lie down or something.
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New and improved version: https://www.cookingchanneltv.com/shows/good-eats-reloaded/episodes/art-of-darkness-ii-the-reload
They’re Cooks Illustrated. America’s Test Kitchen is the parent company that publishes Cooks Illustrated, Cooks Country, and produces the AMT and Cooks Country TV shows, the 3 websites. Used to be a radio show too.
Having been frustrated with the magazine by the time I noticed the TV show I’ve never bothered. The grade of clips that tend to make it to YouTube indicate it’s more of the same.
So same applies. They’ve essentially found a way to run one cooking publication, and dice it up into dozens of subscription required pieces. Then advertise it by maintaining a couple PBS shows.
Alton Brown is probably the most significant voice in public culinary education since Juilia Child. While a lot of the Good Eats material is out dated, much of that was produced 15 years ago, the later stuff is still very solid. And Brown actively corrects himself, and engages really well the rest of the geeky authoritative food scene.
And the Food Network made him a game show host.
His FN contract was purportedly up a few years back and he launched his own site around that time. About more than just food. The updated and new recipes were excellent. Responding to and building on new developments. And his how to tie a bow tie video is pretty much the default reference. So there were inklings of some very nice fashion, design, craft and home info on top of the food stuff. He announced Good Eats would be be back and better, likely online.
And he’s still a game show host. Apparently the last update said he’d be back, online, in 2018. And that didn’t happen.
It disappoints me deeply. He’s about as responsible for teaching me to cook as my grandparents and my time in restaurant kitchens.
Food Lab is great. It’s basically the source on technique these days. The author J Kenji Lopez-Alt basically picked up where Brown left off. And the two don’t exactly collaborate, but frequently play off each other. He also used to work for Cooks Illustrated, and has little kind to say about them or the experience.
The website that publishes him is Serious Eats. And they were amazing for years. Still put out very good information. But less frequently and with a smaller staff. Do a lot more reposting old articles than they used to. At one point it was a daily read for me.
The Guardian’s food writing is uniformly excellent. And I’ve had great results from Cloake’s recipes when I’ve used them. Though I’m not a regular reader of hers, or the paper. So I can’t say much more than that.
It’s the first place I go for anything British or Britishish. Still using an Irish Brown Bread recipe they published that supplanted my Grandmother’s (not the one who taught me to cook).
And I’m a really shit Baker. Metric recipes and working with weight is the only thing that makes them a useful resource for me. So European recipes being both metric, and standardised on weight. Means the Guardian is a great place for me to find low intensity baking recipes. Should I feel the need to do that to myself again.
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