Add This Nutty Ingredient To Boxed Brownies For Triple The Flavor (Hint: It's Not Walnuts)

A good oil swap can be a fantastic thing when it comes to boxed brownie mix — just look at the success we had with mayo, which actually makes brownies so much more flavorful. When you want to add serious nuance to boxed brownies, which can err on the side of aggressive sweetness to the point of flatness, our magic bullet ingredient is browned butter. Also called beurre noisette in French, this is simply regular butter that has been heated so that some of its water has evaporated, leaving the milk solids to separate and brown. The resulting product is caramel-colored and intensely nutty and flavorful. Swapping browned butter for oil in your boxed brownies works for the same reason that soy sauce as a salt substitute in brownies is effective. In both cases, you're adding in some unexpected savory notes, which really enhance sweets.

You may want to experiment with this hack a bit until you perfect it. Some recipes will simply measure out the same amount of butter as the oil that the box calls for and then cook it down. As many have pointed out, however, the process of browning butter means that some of the liquid content is lost to evaporation. If you feel like your brownies are too gooey without the missing liquid, add in a couple tablespoons of cream or milk, or even an extra egg white. With all that said, you might be fine with a 1:1 swap. We suspect that your mileage will vary depending on how you like the texture of your brownie batter.

Using browned butter in your boxed brownies, whether sweet cream or regular (yes, there's a small difference depending on whether the cream is cultured or not), can do marvelous things for the flavor of your dessert. That doesn't mean, however, that you are limited to just one flavor hack when mixing up your batter! As seen in a TikTok clip dedicated to elevating boxed brownies, a home chef utilized several complementary steps to make her sweets sublime. To that end, she added not just brown butter but a small amount of vanilla extract, chocolate chips, and some instant espresso powder. The end result? Fudgy, flavor-packed brownies with an unctuous mouthfeel and mature nuance. 

We might be tempted to swap the semisweet chocolate chips for the darkest dark chocolate we can get for a bitter note, or, on the other hand, creamy butterscotch chips to match the almost savory elements of our browned butter. 

Browned butter is the foundation on which you can customize your boxed brownies and make them really exceptional. With the browned butter alone, you're getting a nuttiness and depth of flavor that mere canola oil simply can't match. When you delve deep into your cache of ingredients and really customize your boxed brownies, however, you stand to create something that can go toe-to-toe with the homemade version. Don't be afraid to mix-and-match different ideas. Just remember that many great boxed brownie substitutions and additions start with a humble process: browning butter in a pan.