A Big Little Recipe has the smallest-possible ingredient list and big everything else: flavor, creativity, wow factor. Psst—we don’t count water, salt, black pepper, and certain fats (specifically, 1/2 cup or less of olive oil, vegetable oil, and butter), since we’re guessing you have those covered. Today, we’re cookie-fying brownies, or brownie-fying cookies. You’ll see.
I know it’s the start of the year and I should be talking about dry January, exercise resolutions, or salads. But what I really want to talk about is Nutella.
You know, that chocolate-hazelnut spread you’re supposed to smear on toast, but really just eat out of the jar with a spoon? Though this is its first appearance in the column (what took me so long?), Nutella is a picture-perfect Big Little ingredient: one item, tons of flavor, and even more baking potential.
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Take these two internet-famous Nutella recipes. They both use three ingredients and the same three ingredients at that—Nutella, flour, and eggs. But the quantities and methods are different, yielding two distinct results:
1. Cookies. 1 cup Nutella, 1 cup flour, 1 large egg. As seen on blogs like Kirbie’s Cravings in 2011 (“basically like dipping your spoon into a jar of nutella, but having it in a cookie form”) and Bigger Bolder Baking last year.
2. Brownies. 1 ¼ cups Nutella, ½ cup flour, 2 large eggs. This also shows up on many blogs, plus big names like Epicurious, where Molly Baz thankfully adds ¼ teaspoon salt.
Now about those ratios. To simplify things, let’s just say they use the same-ish amount of Nutella. In that case, the cookies use twice the amount of flour and half the amount of eggs. Pretty significant, right? But what does it mean?
As Shirley O. Corriher writes in her James Beard Award winning–book BakeWise: “Eggs and flour are the two proteins that hold cookies together.” So if you lower or lose the eggs, the flour becomes even more important, and if you lower or lose the flour, the eggs become even more important.
Since typical three-ingredient Nutella cookies use so much flour and so little egg (sort of like shortbread), they take on a cakey, crumbly texture. Whereas typical three-ingredient Nutella brownies use so little flour and more eggs to achieve that fudgy, gooey brownie-like center.
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All of which got me thinking: What if I don’t want a cakey, crumbly Nutella cookie? What if I want one that’s got a crackly shell and fudgy center? What if I want a cookie that thinks it’s a brownie (or a brownie that thinks it’s a cookie)?
Just swap the quantities and method.
In other words, take the Nutella brownie ratio and apply a cookie technique—dropping the droopy batter onto a sheet tray, in blobs, and baking until the egg sets the batter juuuust enough.
How much is just enough is a personal question, really. You could bake them for seven minutes or eight or nine. To find out which you like best, do what I do with just about any cookie recipe:
Bake one cookie (yep, just one), let it cool a bit, taste it, then bake the rest accordingly. I could act all authoritative and tell you that one amount of time is the best. But it’s your cookie brownie, and your opinion matters most.
Have you ever made either the three-ingredient Nutella cookies or brownies? What’d you think? Tell us in the comments below.
