I have had some tests brewing (baking?) in my head for a long time, ever since the ever popular brownie oil/eggs-substitution test went up over a year ago. I decided it is time to try out a few new substitutions and do a blind taste test.
How do brownies (from a box) taste when you substitute certain things with the oil and eggs?
Today’s new substitutions: mayo, yogurt and avocado!
I just returned from a trip to Tanzania. To commemorate this trip to East Africa, I will be testing a recipe I saw online for pili pili oil.
Pili pili is the Swahili name for “pepper”, so this is simply a hot pepper oil. Pili pili sauce (hot sauce) was very common in dishes I experienced in Tanzania, but I did not experience any spicy oil.
Warning: non-scientific (yet yummy) experiments below.
Food experiments in this blog fall into two categories of preparation:
a) planned out ahead of time, with research and getting the right ingredients;
b) Deciding on the spot to test something out with the food I have in my kitchen, usually in a hunger induced haze.
This is something I did on the fly. I had leftover sage. I wanted to have them in fried form.
So what was the best way to get these wise leaves crunchy?
The search for this answer while leaving out thorough research, and we get today’s experiment: what is the difference between frying sage with and then without a flour coating? And what is the simplest, best way to coat them for a good crunch?
BONUS POST: Not all of my food experiments go well, so today we learn the important lesson that failing is OK…
In today’s experiment, I tested four different methods of making brownies from a box. I’ve heard of many ways you can substitute other healthier things for the oil (typical brownie ingredients from a box are the brownie mix, eggs and vegetable oil), but with this experiment, I tested three.
What difference do different substitutions make to the brownies?
For this test, I had a whopping 14 people help me out (asking for taste testers at a party, especially when it is about testing brownies, is a crowd-pleaser, surprisingly).
