So far, I have baked peanut butter brownies and extremely sugary/buttery brownies from scratch. My original peanut butter brownie batch appealed primarily to myself and my friends, who prefered salty foods. On the other hand, my sweet-toothed floormates preferred my second batch of brownies, in which I simply removed the peanut butter from the original recipe and significantly increased the sugar and butter.
For my third brownie trial, I wondered which category of taste a standard, pre made brownie mix at Safeway would fall into: sweet or savoury? Scanning the various types of brownie mixes on the shelf, I finally settled on the Double Chocolate Ghirardelli Brownie Mix. I avoided any organic brownie mixes and simply based my selection on the product’s advertisement pictures in order to find a highly processed brownie mix for comparison with my brownies from scratch. Examining brownie mix, decorated with the gold Ghirardelli chocolate bar design at the top and a delicious, freshly baked brownie square beneath the logo.
I pulled the mix off the shelf, flipped the box, and read the ingredients: Sugar, enriched bleached flour (wheat flour, niacin, reduced iron, thiamin mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid), chocolate chips (sugar, chocolate liquor, cocoa butter, soy lecithin [emulsifier], vanilla), canola or soybean oil, natural cocoa, cocoa (processed with alkali), wheat starch, salt, artificial flavor, sodium bicarbonate. “How funny!” I said to my friend, pointing at the box. “You would predict chocolate or cocoa as the first ingredient of premium double chocolate brownies, yet actually it’s just sugar.”
Walking back to the Graham lounge kitchen, I wondered if these brownies would turn out sweeter or saltier. Although the first ingredient was sugar, it also contained salt and sodium bicarbonate, which should add a salty flavour, like the peanut butter did in batch one. We placed the box of brownie mix on the counter, and read the instructions on the back. Unlike the brownies from scratch we had made in the past weeks, this “recipe” only had three steps: (1) Preheat oven; (2) mix together water, oil, and eggs with the brownie mix; (3) bake.
Whereas both brownie batches made from scratch took about 45 minutes of preparation time, the box mix recipe only took us about 10 minutes. Though my learning curve in cooking contributed to some of the preparation time saved (and also the smoothness and simplicity of the recipe), we all agreed that having a pre made box mix gave us an enormous shortcut. I guess I grew accustomed to baking from scratch, because I felt slightly disappointed when putting the brownie tray in the oven. I felt like a cheater, and told my friend “That’s it? Are you sure we aren’t skipping any steps?”
Ding! My friend’s phone timer rang, and we excitedly opened the oven door. The crispy golden brown top of the brownie looked shockingly similar to the advertisement photograph. I poked a fork through the crisp outer shell and into the soft cake part of the brownie. It came out clean, so we carefully transferred the brownie tray onto the stovetop to cool. “Brownies are ready!” I called out to my floormates again, knocking on their doors as I jogged down the hall.
Once the brownies cooled, I carefully cut it into neat little squares, about a fourth of the serving piece in the advertisement picture on the box. Handing each of my friends and floormates a slice, we tried predicting whether these brownies would be sweet or savoury. Excluding two of my friends who adamantly argued the brownies would be as salty as the peanut butter batch (despite the fact that Double Chocolate Ghirardelli Brownies has absolutely no peanut butter inside), everyone including myself believed the brownies would taste as sweet as the super sugary and buttery brownies we had made for batch two.
“Three, two, one…” I bit into my steaming soft brownie square and slowly chewed, letting the chocolate melt on my tongue. Though it did not taste quite as salty as the peanut butter brownies that I loved, it also tasted less overwhelmingly sweet as batch two. My friends who shared my taste agreed, saying that they rated peanut butter brownies as the best, this shortcut batch of brownies as second best, and the extra sugar and butter batch as third. My floormates, most of whom had a sweet tooth, rated our different brownie batches in the exactly opposite order: super sugary and buttery brownies tasted best, the box mix tasted second best, and the peanut butter ones worst of the three.
After thinking about it, I considered the Double Chocolate Ghirardelli Brownie Mix company quite smart. By making their brownies both sweet and savoury, this enabled their product to appeal to both their sweet-toothed customers and also their salt-loving customers.
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