One-Pot Brownies With a Secret Ingredient for Extra Fudginess
C'mon, just dare us not to eat the whole tray.
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Photo by Rocky Luten
Has a single recipe ever changed the way you bake, for good?
For me, the answer is emphatically "yes," and the recipe is this one:
It's the Maialino olive oil cake, which our Resident Genius, Kristen Miglore, wrote about in 2014. I'd had other olive oil cakes before, sure, but never one like this. It was so beautifully succulent in the center—custardy, almost—without feeling mawkish or overly dense. It was aromatic and floral, in the most nuanced of ways. It was basically effortless (two bowls, zero special equipment), yet a total showstopper.
And it made me want to put olive oil in everything. So I did.
For years, I've dabbled with swapping out any token fat for my favorite olive oil at the moment. Like, in pancakes. And banana bread. And the Ovenly secretly vegan chocolate chip cookies, which call for a neutral oil as their fat.
My biggest success story to date—like most success stories—has involved chocolate. More specifically, in the form of brownies.
I'd been making them roughly the same way for 20 years, based on a one-pot recipe my mom adapted from a New Basics version. At some point, I added espresso powder, and a bit of Dutch-processed cocoa, too (I love the Oreo-reminiscent flavor). I began giving them a sugar-salt sprinkle on top for crackly crust insurance, and doubled down on vanilla extract. But the single most significant breakthrough came when I swapped out the butter for olive oil, resulting in delightfully flavored brownies so tender, I wondered if they were about to slip a love letter into my locker.
The batter comes together all in one pot, meaning these brownies will require you to find a way to fill the other 25 minutes while they cook, after the couple you'll spend cleaning. (A few things I can highly recommend: Staring at the brownies while they bake. Deep breaths. Ordering more olive oil—I like to use a subtly flavored bottle I'd cook with.) Then, they'll emerge from the oven so chocolatey and fudgy (gooey, almost, in the center) that you'll forget you ever made them another way.
Butter, who?
Are you making brownies this week? Let us know in the comments!