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I would like to make a chocolate brownie which has no added sweetener. It would be great if it were gluten-free as well, but that is less important.

I tried a recipe from Dinah Alison's "Totally Flour-Free Baking" which had as ingredients:

140g butter, 215g sugar, 2 eggs, 75g ground almonds, 4 tablespoons of cocoa powder, 200g chocolate, 85 g walnuts, 1/2 tspn of vanilla essence and 50g choc chips.

I adapted this by losing the sugar, replacing the choc chips with more walnuts and using pure "cacao" from this site:

http://williescacao.com/fine-chocolate/products/

The result was quite nice to eat, but much, much too crumbly. The brownies just had no cohesion.

I tried a second attempt by adding cocoa butter - figuring that I hadn't got enough fat in - but that didn't help much, and the cocoa butter made it less chocolatey.

What am I doing wrong? I suspect that maybe her recipe doesn't have enough egg, but is there anything else I should adjust?

Note that its really important there's no sweetener. "Sugar-free" recipes on the net all seem to have something else - bananas/dates/sucrulose/apple mash. The recipe above is as sweet as I ever want it to be.

Edit: the flour-free nature of the recipe is a plus but not vital. If I can get a plausible sugar-free brownie working then I can worry about the flour later.

Francis Davey
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2 Answers2

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I would use stewed apple as per assorted recipes on the net - if you stew cooking apples with no added sugar then they won't make it any sweeter.

Vicky
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Your post suggests but doesn't explicitly state that you don't want to use dates, so just in case: Medjool dates, soaked and blitzed in a food processor, are used in a lot of recipes on the website Minimalist Baker, and in one brownie recipe on a YT channel called Recetas de Gri. The stickiness would help with your recipe, but I don't know whether the resulting texture would be what you want. (Your ingredients list includes 200g chocolate, which contains sugar; perhaps replace that with unsweetened cocoa powder and then use some dates, which would add a binder while keeping the sweetness minimal?)

Also, have you tried adding a chickpea-flour egg? 1/4 cup of chickpea flour + 1/4 cup of water (or halve that), blended well and allowed to sit briefly. Tastes vile when the flour is raw, but the taste disappears during baking. Some people use aquafaba (the water surrounding canned chickpeas, or the leftover water after cooking dried chickpeas) as an egg substitute; I've not tried it. (You didn't say or imply that you're opposed to adding another chicken egg, but I'm sharing this info bc it might be of use.)

DWDW
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