Black Bean Brownies

1 minute read

Updated:

I’ve wanted to make black bean brownies for awhile now, ever since I heard many people raving about how they can be indistinguishable from the real thing. I also wanted to use up a jar of nut-free Nutella alternative. There are lots of recipes that use nutella in brownies.

From my analysis, they are directly substituting the fat and sugar components with nutella. Because nutella is very high sugar (proportionally), recipes tend to introduce a bit of fat, to bring the ratios back inline.

But I was doomed from the very beginning: Turns out my faux Nutella was actually a chocolate peanut butter alternative, based on the ingredient ratios.

Since I did all the hard work of comparing and analyzing, I thought it would be interesting to see the comparison.

Peanut Butter

Peanut butter is composed of peanuts (86%) and sugar (10%). And addition of oil for emulsification stabilization.

It’s 50% fat, 25% carbs and 25% protein.

Nutella

Nutella is composed of sugar (55%), oil (15%), hazelnuts (13%), milk powder (9%), cocoa (8%). The rest are emulsifiers and flavouring.

It’s 30% fat, 55% carbs, and 7% protein.

Where I went wrong and what to change for next time

My mistake was incorrectly substituting peanut butter into a nutella recipe. From the ingredient composition, the balance of fat and sugar would be off. But that’s not a big issue, since you can tune the tweak the recipe using oil and sugar.

The problem is the additional protein, which is harder to 1:1 substitute.

If I had known this was peanut butter, I think I would have tried to do the following:

  • Substitute part of the nutella (maybe 50%) with fat, sugar, and cocoa to correct the ratios
  • Add more liquid to compensate for the dry ingredient (protein)
  • Maybe an extra egg for binding

Black Bean Brownies

The minimalist baker seems to be a very popular recipe. When compared to a fudgy brownie, the black bean seems to substitute:

  • all the flour
  • some of the additional egg and yolk, when converting brownie to a fudgy variant
  • some of the sugar