There’s a chance this will be the worst recipe that I find in this little adventure. It’s certainly the recipe that sparked the inspiration that led to this experiment. This, right here, is the recipe that looked so bad I couldn’t believe someone had intentionally published it. I just had to try it for myself.
This is what a brownie should look like (thanks Wikipedia!). It's not what I made. Sorry for getting anyone's hopes up.
The recipe is vegan, so the use of banana seems sensible - I’ve used banana as a substitute for egg before, and it works well in the right circumstances. Also, I love chocolate and bananas, so mixing the two seems like a no-brainer.
Ingredients and Method:
1x medium banana
10g cacao powder
Pinch baking soda
4–5 sprays light spray oil
4–5 chopped strawberries
2tsp low fat natural vegan yogurt
Mix banana and cocoa powder in a bowl until it resembles a puree
Add a pinch of baking soda
Place on a baking sheet coated with cooking spray oil
Bake in a preheated oven at 175 ° C for 15–20 minutes
Take out of the oven and let cool down before eating
Top with vegan yogurt and strawberries
Tip– best to make this recipe in bulk
Tip – great pre–workout snack
Now, this describes itself as a ‘delicious, easy to follow recipe’, and looking at it, it definitely seems easy to follow. Take out the unasked-for opinions at the end, and we’re left with mashing the bananas and cocoa, mixing with…
Hold on…
The ingredient list says cacao powder, but the method says cocoa powder. Is that just a typo? My first thought is that they’re the same thing, but let’s just check.
[One quick Google later…]
No, they’re not exactly the same, but they’re close. Cocoa powder has been roasted and is slightly less bitter, while cacao powder hasn’t been roasted and is slightly more bitter. Cacao powder seems to be more commonly labelled as vegan, and is slightly more expensive on average, but given that I can’t find any substantial differences, I’ll assume they’re interchangeable. That’s good, because I only have cocoa powder at home.
Right, back on track. Mash the bananas and cocoa, mix in the baking soda, and bake.
Where’s the flour? Where’s the sugar? Where’s the fat? This isn’t a brownie recipe, it’s just chocolate banana paste!
From what I know of baking, if you’re using baking soda, it’s because it will react with something acidic in your mixture to create air bubbles, which then make your baked product rise. I've used baking soda in bakes before, and it works pretty well as long as you balance it out with the acidic ingredients, because otherwise you end up tasting the baking soda, which isn’t usually what you want.
I can only assume bananas are acidic? But rather than assuming, let’s find out.
[One quick Google later…]
It turns out bananas are mildly acidic, starting at around pH 4–5 when unripe, and neutralising a bit as they ripen (a ripe banana settling at around pH 6.5). What with the mushing involved, I’ll be using a very ripe banana, so my banana will be close to neutral. I also checked the pH of cocoa powder while I was googling, and it sits somewhere in the middle of the banana’s range at around pH 5.5. I don’t know if that’s acidic enough to react with the baking soda, or if there’s enough soda to make an impact on the heavy banana mixture, but I guess we’ll find out!
My final worry is that I don’t know how well the cocoa (or cacao) powder will combine with the banana. Whenever I mix it with milk for hot chocolate, I always end up with clumps of powder that take a lot of whisking to get rid of, and that's what I'm picturing here. But this is something I can test – I’ll split the banana into three pieces, and try three different ways to mix them. Then I can combine all the tests and carry on with the recipe.
Cocoa powder with no sugar sounds like it’s going to be bitter, and the lack of flour and fat makes me suspect this will not turn out much like a brownie. But who knows – maybe the cocoa powder will act like flour, maybe the baking soda will puff the whole thing up, maybe the banana will be enough to counter the bitterness of the cocoa. I predict not, but we’ll see.
I’m going to follow a slightly modified method so I can test the mixing ability of cocoa powder and banana, so here is what I’m actually going to do.
Actual Method:
Prepare the baking sheet – I’ll line it with greaseproof paper as well as oiling it, which should help lift the brownie off afterwards.
Cut banana into 3 pieces and divide into 3 small bowls:
Bowl 1 – dump all the cocoa powder onto the banana and mix.
Bowl 2 – sift all the cocoa powder onto the banana and mix.
Bowl 3 – mash the banana separately and add it gradually to the cocoa powder.
Make a decision on best banana–cocoa mixing technique.
Mix the three bowls of banana together.
Add the pinch of baking soda.
Spoon mixture onto baking sheet, hopefully into a nice–looking shape
Bake – I’m using a non–fan oven, and I assume the oven temperature is for fan, so I’m upping the temperature a little to compensate.
Cool, cut, and
cryeat.
The strawberries and the yoghurt are toppings, so I’m ignore those – this is a test of the bake itself, not the disguises it wears.
Here's everything I'll need (crammed onto my tiny worktop), so I’m ready to go. In about half an hour I will either have a surprising vegan brownie, or something resembling a puddle of brown custard. Wish me luck!
First up, the mixing test.
For a
moment I worry there won’t be enough volume of ingredients in each bowl to do a proper test, but once
I’ve distributed the banana, I realise I’ll be alright. I dump, sift, or
gradually incorporate the two ingredients, and discover it’s actually really
easy to mix cocoa and banana, and all three tests turn out exactly the same. Sigh.
But that’s Science! I didn’t know something, so I tested it and found out. It’s only a waste of time if you don’t learn something.
Anyway, aside from the learnin’ all that really did was make more washing up for me, so I’m moving on. A pinch of baking soda is a horribly unspecific measurement in most circumstances, and I’d prefer a measurement that has been shown to be the perfect amount to do its job and balance with the other ingredients, but I can only work with what I’m given. In the end, I go for slightly less that I think I should, because I’d rather have a flatter brownie than a soda-tasting brownie, and I put in what I think is just under an eighth of a teaspoon. I mix that in well, then reach for the baking sheet.
My mixture is pretty liquid. It’s not runny, but it definitely pours out of the bowl on its own, needing barely any encouragement from my spoon. Also, it’s only one banana, so it forms a sad little puddle in the middle of the sheet. I quickly pat it into a slightly nicer shape, and pop it in the oven.
15-20 minutes seems a long time. I’m not going to stare at it through the glass – instead, I go back to my computer and look at the recipe page again, just to see if there are any photos I missed that I can compare my finished product to.
Surprisingly, there’s no photos, but there is a video! That’ll be even better, since it’ll show consistency as well as the final product.
…
After watching, it, I would like to take back my hasty comment about it being ‘better’. The person making it adds the baking soda first, blends rather than mixes, and uses a ceramic baking dish rather than a baking sheet. All sensible things, but if that’s how they wanted this recipe to go, why didn’t they write it that way? Finally, the dish comes out of the oven and, without seeming to let it cool, the strawberries and yoghurt are added with the brownie still in the dish. There’s no knowing how it’s supposed to look, except that it’s dark brown on top. Oh, also, as the strawberries are placed, you can see the brownie mixture spreading with the weight. Either they’re using a little-know variety of extremely heavy strawberries, or the brownie isn’t solid. Great.
Okay, that didn’t help. I head back into the kitchen after 15 minutes and take a look at what I’m creating.
How do I tell when it’s done? Cakes get springy, biscuits go brown, bread sounds hollow… is there a magic change that happens to banana and cocoa powder when it’s finished cooking? I’m not certain it’s going to change in any meaningful way, but I decide to split the difference and give it another 2 minutes.
Finally, and arbitrarily, I decide it’s been hot long enough, and take it out. I slide the whole thing onto a cool surface and try to avoid looking at it until it’s ‘done’. I leave it for 20 minutes to cool completely, hoping fiercely that something magic is about to happen.
|
Before baking and after |
I thought I could skip over the plating–up bit and move straight to the tasting, but this actually warrants a paragraph. The “brownie” is disturbing. I give it poke to see if it’s firm enough to move, and it’s rubbery, but even worse than that, it’s… clammy. And really cold. The baking sheet it was on in the oven is still warm, but this has lost all heat, and seems to be actively generating chill.
I'm probably imagining that.
Still, it's… how do I put it… cohesive enough to move onto a plate, so I do that and cut it in half. If I don’t look too closely it looks like a chocolate chip cookie on the outside, and the inside could be mistaken for chocolate mousse. But I've touched it, and it feels like neither of those things. You can't roll a chocolate chip cookie up like an overcooked omelette.
The flavour, when I actually work up the courage to put some in my mouth, isn’t great, but it’s not terrible, either. The lack of sugar is surprisingly not the worst thing about it – the sweetness of the banana balances the cocoa better than I thought it would. If we'd been true to the ingredients list and used the bitterer cacao powder instead, I think it might be a different story, but flavour–wise I can almost pretend I’m eating banana bread with chocolate chips.
However...
The texture is hideous. It's floppy. While I can just about pick it up and eat it, it tears under its own weight, and the torn edge is stickier so it's much harder to peel it off the plate. There's a skin over the whole thing that is soft enough to go unnoticed if you have a small piece, but larger pieces are pretty obvious on the tongue. Under the skin it's as smooth as my half–hearted mashing skills made it (which is not super smooth). The edges are just chewy enough that they feel like lumps.
I have a number of feelings about this.
Disappointment
– sometimes you can forgive a recipe for being unworkable, but someone filmed
themselves making this, saw how it turned out, AND STILL POSTED IT! And not
only that, posted it under the name “Brownie”, which is just insulting. There's a wide variety of opinions on the proper texture of a brownie, with people getting into quite
heated debates about it in some corners of the internet, but if there's one way to
unite the different brownie factions it would be to give them this. Everyone
would agree, peace would descend on the brownie world as people joined together in defiance of this new evil.
Relief – I thought this would create something like a puddle of brown custard, and I was right. Well, mostly right, because I love cold custard and I don't want to insult it by grouping this floppy monstrosity in with it. But I guess my baking instincts aren't as bad as they could be, and that's reassuring.
Curiosity – completely unexpectedly, I find myself wanting to try making this better. Not as a brownie, but as what it should be – a pudding. I want to try baking it in a ramakin topped with slices of pear, I want to try turning it into a pie filling, I want to make it not as sad and uncomfortable to look at as it currently is. I'm fighting this urge, because you shouldn't build on bad foundations, but maybe there's a way to make the foundation better…?
We'll see. For now, I won't try again. There's only so much misery I can eat, and the last of this batch is waiting damply for me to finish it. It’s not inedible by any means, but it’s not pleasant. But hey, it said it was a ‘great pre-workout snack’, and I think it was right about that! If I was faced with the option of eating food like this or exercising, I'd chose exercise too.
Conclusion:
Pros - Quick, few ingredients, doesn't taste awful.
Cons - Clammy, foldable, made of lies.
Opinion - Unless you want a prop for a homemade horror movie, do not make.
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