Swap Sugar With Sweet Potatoes For A Fudgier Brownie

Whether you're cutting down on refined sugars, gluten, or eggs, sweet potatoes are a multi-purpose swap for many common dessert ingredients. They'll certainly live up to their name as a sugar swap in a brownie recipe, but sweet potatoes will also instill a decadently fudgy texture. The rich, dense, and ultra moist pulp of sweet potato puree contains plenty of natural sugar and starch to replace most of the sweetener and a portion of the flour of a standard brownie recipe.

Since brownies tend to be much denser than normal cakes, sweet potato puree can even replace eggs. Without the leavening powers of eggs, sweet potato brownies will substitute as a binder only, resulting in especially dense, melt-in-your-mouth fudginess. Plus, sweet potatoes have an underlying earthiness that'll complement the chocolatey notes in cocoa powder.

While sweet potatoes are a great sugar swap, they aren't a complete swap. You'll still want to include another form of sweetener, which you can use to your advantage by choosing a more complex sugar alternative like maple syrup, pureed dates, or even mashed bananas. As a general rule, mashed sweet potatoes comprise ⅔ of the total sugar in a brownie recipe, leaving ⅓ cup of added sweetener. You can bake, steam or boil a sweet potato, scooping out the pulp and roughly mashing them in a mixing bowl to blend with the wet ingredients, followed by the dry ingredients. Depending on the ingredients in question, mashed sweet potato brownies are often dump-it recipes.

Depending on how many dietary restrictions you want to respect, you can implement more unique ingredient swaps in a batch of sweet potato brownies. Many vegan-friendly recipes swap butter for nut butters like almond, peanut, or cashew butter. Even if you don't avoid dairy, nuts are a delicious flavor pairing to enhance the tasting notes of chocolate; consider the global popularity of hazelnuts and chocolate in Nutella or peanut butter and chocolate in Reese's peanut butter cups. You could also enhance the nut butter swap by adding its whole nut form to the batter or as a toasted topping.

This recipe for vegan and gluten-free sweet potato brownies adapted by Tasting Table takes it a step further by swapping butter with almond butter, the wheat flour with almond flour and ground hazelnuts, and topping the brownies with roughly chopped toasted hazelnuts. If you have nut allergies, sunflower seed butter and tahini are nut-free butters that'll still provide fat with a nutty flavor. Gluten-free oat flour and nut-free spelt flour could also go well with sweet potato brownie recipes. Other recipes exclude flour altogether in favor of a simple blend of sweet potato puree, nut butter, cocoa powder, and chocolate chips. Sweet potato puree can also be a delicious foundation for chocolate frosting to spread over a batch of sweet potato brownies. In the absence of sweet potato puree, pumpkin or butternut squash puree will do.