WELCOME TO OUR KITCHEN: We're doing a taste test of boxed brownie mixes!

Hey, I'm Bruce Weinstein, and this is the podcast cooking with Bruce and Mark. And I'm Mark Scarbrough. And together with Bruce, we have written a total of 41 books. That's impossible to believe, but you didn't know Bruce wrote two knitting books. In addition to all our cookery books, he wrote a cocktail book before we ever hitched up together. And I wrote a memoir bookmarked about my life in the great works of Western literature. Wow, it is crazy. So we are now in our food and cooking podcast.

We've got a one minute cooking tip. We're going to do a taste test of brownie mixes. I laughed because I couldn't figure out how to get out of that introduction. Can you hear that? A taste test of brownie mixes. Bruce has made a ton, five different brownie mixes. And we're going to taste them on air and see what we think about them. them, and then we're going to tell you what's making us happy besides brownies in food this week.

Today's one minute cooking tip is all about potatoes. Are you making potato salad or mashed potatoes or any other dish that requires you? What's happening here? Is it, what? Potato salad. Why not? I love potato salad in the winter. Oh, yum. Do, do go on. Well if you're making... Anything that requires boiled potatoes, cut them into pieces before boiling them.

I know it sounds obvious, but you would not believe how many people in our cooking demos and classes say, Why does it take so long to cook potatoes when they're putting them in the water whole? It's true. It's absolutely true. If you cut potatoes up into smaller pieces, they cook more quickly. I know.

But you can't believe how many cooking classes we've been in where people have dropped an entire baked potato in a pot and brought it to a boil and complains of takes a long and it's kind of amazing. Yes, indeed. Cut them into small bits. And just so you know, the smaller you cut them a the more starch they leach into the water and be the quicker they cook. So if you don't want dry potatoes. Don't cut them into little tiny bits. Otherwise they leach a lot of starch out into the water.

Okay, that seems like a good cooking tip. All of that potatoes. We know all about potatoes, don't we? We wrote a book, the ultimate potato book did spokespeople for potato boards and all that kind of thing. Do you know there's a difference between the U. S. Potato board And the American Potato Board, and the Idaho Potato Board. And do you know they all don't speak to each other? Oh no, they hate each other. And do you know that they're all Mormons? Well, I learned that.

So there you go, that's what we can tell you about potatoes in the U. S. Let's move on.

We have got a taste test of brownie mixes up next. This is going to be wild. We're going to taste them live on air, so let's get to it. I baked these last night, so they've all had the same amount of time to cool and stale out or whatever they're going to do together. Stale out. Well, it's not like I want to, I didn't want to bake one yesterday and some this morning. I baked them all at the same time. I know, I know, I get it. They do collapse. They do condense and collapse. They can.

And I baked them all in 9 inch square pans because every one of these box mix said you could do a 9x13 or a 9x9 or an 8x8. Isn't that interesting? Wait a minute, the box mixes say you can use a variety of pans? And they give you the different. temperature of your oven and the different cooking time, depending upon what you're doing. Wow. Okay. So that's, uh, that's how long it's been since I made a boxed brownie mix. So I followed the instructions on the back of each box for a nine by nine.

And I tried to keep the flavor variety the same or as close as I could when I bought them. So we are going to start with Pillsbury. Chocolate fudge. Okay. Now, all of these brownies just want to say pulling it off. You pull it off. I'm not talking about because the mixes all require one or two eggs. They all required anywhere from half to two thirds of a cup oil. They all call for a little bit of water. And yes, you can Play with those things, but I didn't I followed it exactly.

So I pulled it off. It's very very dark colored It has the traditional crackly crust. I haven't touched it yet Eating it and I have to say that just looking at it. It appears though It says what fudge brownies chocolate fudge these appear to be pretty cakey. So, let's see I'm eating my um, um, Well, it's very fudgy. Okay, so that was the Pillsbury chocolate fudge. And here's my take on it. My initial reaction, in my head, is candy. That's my initial reaction. Very sweet. Is that I taste candy.

I'm not tasting brownie. I'm tasting candy. It had, you know what? The chocolate is not super intense. No. It almost, I'm taking your candy theme and running with it. I feel like I've eaten a Tootsie Roll. Yeah, except, except darker chocolate. There is more chocolate to it than that. But there's a Tootsie Roll flavor afterwards, after I swallowed it.

There's a there's a huge difference and you probably know this already if you're listening to us long enough But you probably know there's a huge difference in cocoa powder and chocolate in what the final tastes are like in baking and this Definitely is more cocoa powder, even though it says fudge to me Yeah, it has that the same thing that you know, if I made hot chocolate with cocoa powder It has that quality of taste to it except it's really sweet I mean

so sweet and the sugar is overwhelming the chocolate and so I happen if you made it in a nine That's nine by 13. They would be thinner and maybe a little more caramelized because they would burn a little bit. I wonder, I wonder about that. I wonder if that's a part of what happens. Okay, well, so let's, let's not belabor the point and move on down. What's the next one? The next one is Betty Crocker's dark chocolate. And the funny thing is.

These are a little darker in color, but not terribly dark. And when I just, I just hunked off a corner of it. We're literally pawing this with our fingers. Yeah, but we're both eating corner pieces. Because we're not Ethan. We eat the corners. Um, so... It's got a crackly top. I like that. It does. It doesn't have as much of a crackly top as the Pillsbury did. And, uh, it looks moisture to the eye. Oh, there's that word. Everyone hates moist. But it does look like it's wetter to the eye.

If it's possible, less chocolate flavor. And less sweet. Okay, so this is the Betty Crocker dog chocolate. It is definitely less sweet. Yep, but also less chocolaty. So interesting, but I like it better. I like the texture. Yeah. It has a, it, it, when I put it in my, oh, this is going to be gross. Now we're going to gross you out on air. When I put it in my mouth, it instantly balled up. Oh, you made a bolus. I did make bolus of chocolate.

Do you know that's the technical term for the wad of food in your mouth before you swallow it? So, um, the, we worry about boli, is it boli? Boluses? I don't know. We worry about those as cookbook writers. Anyway, um, it definitely has that feel. I don't want to tell you how we worry about them. It has that feel of balling up a bit in my mouth. It was interesting. The other one, the, the Pillsbury tended to more fall apart, like cake in my mouth. This one tended to roll forward. It did.

It almost did like what happens with Wonder Bread, where you can mush it into a ball. It absolutely did. What's really fascinating is I'm looking at this cutting board at the array of thin, long slices, and it's like a color chart. All right, so now this is a much lighter color. This is Duncan Hines Chewy Fudge. And interestingly enough, the color of it is a lot lighter. It looks like milk chocolate on the top for my money, for my dollar. This has the most crackly top to it of all of them.

And Duncan Hines, I swear, this is what my mom made when I was a kid. It also looks the least. For, I'm not going to use that word again that everyone hates. The M word. I'm going to say it looks the least wet inside when I pulled off a piece. Again, we are pawing this with our fingers. It's ridiculous. I actually think this one is good. It has, oh my gosh, more chocolate. That's my childhood. It has more chocolate.

than the Betty Crocker did than the previous one, but also less sweet than the Pillsbury. I don't know how they do this. I'm sure it's a chemical thing because it's dried or it's dried vanilla, but it has a vanilla aftertaste to it. And looking at the color, because it's a lighter chocolate, my guess is that this is not Dutch cocoa. Regular cocoa powder is a light. Chocolatey color.

When they use dutched cocoa where they add an alkali to it, it gets very dark and that's what gives like Oreos their darkness is dutch cocoa. And my guess is this is not, the color of this tells me it's not dutched cocoa. But I, so far what I like about this is that I have a little more chocolate. Then the first one in the Pillsbury, but less sweet, which is good. Yeah, so so far of the three I like this.

I mean listen, you know, everybody of course loves to put ice cream on brownies And the the for me the Pillsbury is too sweet for ice cream. This one was too sweet for anything the right one to put ice the so far the Duncan Hines is the right one to put and what Duncan Hines is it again? Chewy fudge. And I didn't get all that chewiness out of it. I wonder, now you made these with oil.

I wonder if we had run in like my mother used to and substituted melted butter if we get a little more chewiness. You can do that, but I was trying to follow, you know, what they say on it. Right. My mother always substituted melted butter for the oil in the box recipes.

And I want to say that someone we posted a couple weeks ago that we were doing this as a podcast and someone posted online and said that they substitute chocolate syrup for the water or sometimes butterscotch ice cream topping thinned out for the water. Now that would make it very sweet, but she did say that made it chewier or it changed the texture and it would. When I think about the fact that I added water to all these.

And I think about the interview I did with Philip Corey a few weeks ago, who is the head pastry chef at Harrods of London. Oh, that was a fabulous episode. Now here we are making box brownie mixes and there I was talking to the head pastry chef at Harrods. But what he said when I asked him about using, you know, milk alternatives, because he does a lot of vegan baking, was he said, you know, the liquid in cakes and bakes for the most part, Can just be water. All you really need is water.

He said, we add milks. We add oat milk, we add dairy milk, we add almond milk, to give it a little other flavor, a little richer mouthfeel. But water works in baking. So it was interesting. True enough for that, I suppose. I have to say, before we go back to tasting brownies, that since Bruce had Philip Corey on, Bruce has made the vegan tahini chocolate cookies from his book, and they are Unbelievable!

Go buy that book, A New Way to Bake, just to get that recipe for the vegan tahini chocolate cookies. They are over the top. Okay, so we're moving on in our testing. So we've done, um, Pillsbury, we've done Betty Crocker, we've done Duncan Hines, and now what are we moving on to? Ghirardelli. And these are the darkest. These are almost black. And this is Ghirardelli dark chocolate. These have little bits of chocolate chips in them. Oh my gosh, this is the chocolateiest without a doubt.

This is, I know I'm eating chocolate to be fair. There are some little mini chocolate chips in this. So I am getting bites of real chocolate. It's also back to be, it is sweeter than the Duncan Hines or the Betty Crocker was, but there is so much chocolate flavor that the sweetness is balanced a little bit better. I think in it it's drier. Um, You know, again, I'm not a heathen, so I eat the edges, only heathens eat the middle of brownies, just, may I say, having offended all of you.

Um, so I eat the edges, and this one, because it's got more chocolate in it, has, I don't want to say burned a bit, but it's gotten crunchy on the edge. Well, the interesting thing about this is, All the boxes say to bake anywhere between 22 and 32 minutes. These Ghirardelli said to bake 45 minutes. That's then why it's also crunchier and drier. That they're particularly wanting you to have this flavor. Well, for my money, that's the best chocolate flavor of the bunch.

Okay. And what's the last one? The last one is an outlier. It's Kodiak, and Kodiak was a brand I saw at the supermarket, and their flavor here is chocolate fudge. It's a whole grain brownie. Oh, okay. All right. And their recipe on the box said, called for butter, but said you can all, you can substitute oil and even a little yogurt or applesauce. So I did that so that they were all made with oil, so we knew the differences. There were, you know, so we knew that it was on the same playing field.

Okay, so it's made, I've already eaten my bite, Bruce is still talking. As this is our relationship in a nutshell, I've eaten my bite and he's still talking. Um, the, the, um, it's drier and you would expect it to be drier. Oh, I'm not fadding. Well, just let me finish. So it's drier and you would expect that with the whole wheat ingredients and all that kind of stuff. I can't. It has a bready quality to it because of the whole wheat.

And I kind of like I don't admit if you were looking for a very standard U. S. Canadian brownie. This would not fit your bill. But it does kind of fit my deal because I like that bready taste. It's got in it. I'm still swallowing. It's kind of dry, so it's hard to swallow. It is dry. It is. With, out of doubt, the Kodiak is the driest of the whole board in front of us. What I think is this, to me, is almost like a chocolate quick bread, as you said, a bread. Or even... Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I can imagine making a chocolate layer cake with a very, very rich, creamy chocolate icing and using this as the cake layers. You're wanting to fat it back up. Because of the whole wheat. So you're wanting to put a buttercream on it. It's not only whole wheat, it's whole grain oats too. Yeah. And I actually, again, but okay, this is a confession on Mark's part. I actually like the taste of whole wheat bread rat way more than white bread. So I'm drawn to this taste.

And if you're drawn to a whole wheat is this Kodiak is a really good cookie. alternative. And doesn't it claim to be really high in protein? This is also high in protein. They have some extra protein added in. Yeah. Yeah. And so, you know, I guess it's a unallegedly healthier alternative is calorie in calorie out, but it's an allegedly healthier alternative for my money. If I had to say what I was going with on the board, I would go with the gear. Yeah, me too.

If, if I'm ever making box brownies again, you're getting your ghiradelli. Yeah. I, that's where I would land because it seemed the best. I also may. Uh, just say I liked the Duncan Hines a lot because it reminded me of my childhood. It's so much what my mom would make, except again, she would make it with butter, not oil.

And it just tasted like what I'd come home from school and there'd be brownies on the stove and I'd get to eat a brownie corner, corner, corner, because I'm not a heathen, a corner of the brownies. And it tasted like that. So that was very nostalgic for me. Um, my mom never baked anything, so the only nostalgia I have is that I would buy brownies and all right. All right. Yeah. And I didn't grow up in fancy New York City. So the brownies that I would have bought would have been a safe way.

So mom made brownies and my grandmother only made brownies. from scratch. My mother made them from a mix because of course I was born and raised in the convenience 60s and 70s. So my mom made them from a mix. The Duncan Hines, it has an assaulter for me. The Ghirardelli is the best. Uh, for me, the loser is the Pillsbury. It's too sweet, way, way, way too sweet and not enough chocolate. It's too sweet. Well, there's our brownie taste test.

We would love to know what you think about Box Mix brownies, or if there's a kind that you love and we didn't try. If you want to drop us a note about that you can find us on our Facebook group cooking with Bruce and Mark, or you can find us on our website, Bruce and mark. com. You can drop us a note about a brownie mix that you like. And we will try another round on the air with listener favorites. So give us a give us a ring, give us a buzz drop us a line.

I sound really old on I give us a ring on the air to Yeah, on the air. Oh my gosh, how on a streaming service on the air. Hello, folks out in TV. Oh, I didn't I see you there. When did you come in? I don't even think our listeners are old enough to know that that was a thing, that it was this faux thing that you walked into people's living rooms on TV and they would say, literally, Oh, hello, I didn't see you there. I don't think our listeners probably are even as old as we are.

Anyway, yes, we're very old. So um, the very old people like Ghirardelli. So there you go. There's our chocolate brownie taste test. We'd love to know more from you and as is traditional, let's finish up with

What's making us happy in food this week? So what's making me happy in food this week is that we recently spent a weekend in the Finger Lakes in New York and we went to some wineries in the Finger Lakes in New York and actually did some tasting and we did a big fancy tasting at Silver Thread Winery and not on their dollar on my dollar. We're not sponsored by Phil Silverhead. And we were, they didn't. And we didn't get this for free. We're not ridiculous influencers. Oh my gosh.

We did pass one influencer shooting a video in a, it made me laugh so hard. I could, I couldn't sit still in the car, but we actually went to Silverhead and we, I tasted their Rieslings. Specifically, and we actually bought a case of one of their Rieslings. So what's making me happy in food this week are Finger Lakes Rieslings. They were quite delicious. I liked the drier, rather than the sweeter. Always see, there I am back to my dark chocolate self. I like the drier, redder than the sweeter.

And it was fun. I had, we had a lot of fun. I had never been, it's hard to believe, but I'd never been to the Finger Lakes and I had never been to Seneca Lake or any of the Finger Lakes before. And so there we were. Going around Seneca Lake. Well, I'd been to Ithaca before as a kid. My cousin went to Cornell, and so I spent time with them. But it was my first time back there, too. And quite honestly, what we did before that wine tasting is what made me happy in food this week.

And it's all about fry food. We had a fry bar lunch that we don't do it very often. But boy, did that make me happy. We went into this place with our friend Ruth. In Watkins, New York. Outside of the Glen. We had fried calamari. We had fried cauliflower. We had battered fried pickles. We had deep fried chicken wings. Then I think I'm missing something. I think there was a cardiologist's office just next door to this restaurant. And it was probably connected. It was just all that fried food.

And then we went to the wine tasting. Yeah, that, and that's a day. So that it was, it was a lot of fun and I can really recommend Finger Lakes wineries as just a really. fun thing to do on a long weekend. If you ever want to take a long weekend to upstate New York. And we were there super off season, super, super leaves down. No, no tourists really around. And it was nice. We had the place to ourselves, which made it even nicer in my books.

Okay. That's our podcast for this week on cooking with Bruce and Mark. We ask that if you could, if you would subscribe to this podcast, if you would rate it, do those things, please, to help us in the analytics, we certainly appreciate it. We are. unsupported as a podcast and choose to be that way. So your support for us would be to give us a rating or even a comment. Thanks for listening to us. And just by the way, we do have a newsletter. It's a comes out every two to three weeks.

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Tell us there what's making you happy at Food This Week and I'm going to post a picture of this very cutting board with the five strips of brownies that we've been picking at so you can see that we actually did. Tasty Brown is here on Cooking with Bruce and Mark.