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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.

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    This is a dupe, will have to look for it when not on mobile. Short: you can't. The sugar in brownies is there for texture, not sweetness.
    – rumtscho ♦
    Jul 29, 2012 at 12:01
  • I did some searching and couldn't find a similar question - but if you can point me at it that would be great. When you say "texture" do you mean (in this context) "structural integrity"? I realise there's lots of debates about the texture of brownies, but at the moment I'd just be pleased to have one that didn't fall apart.
    – Francis Davey
    Jul 29, 2012 at 13:07
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    cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/24458/…. Probably not similar enough to close your question, but a brownie differs from a cake, muffin, quickbread etc. by its texture - it is soft and moist and on the verge of gooey. It is the combination of fat and sugar which makes it this way, with the right amounts of starch, lecithine and gluten. You could use a sugar other than sucrose, but if you try to go with no sugar at all, it won't be a brownie any more.
    – rumtscho ♦
    Jul 29, 2012 at 15:31
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    On another note, cohesion is achieved by protein, fat actually hinders it. It is no wonder that a flourless recipe crumbles, especially with no additives. Modifying good flourless recipes is really hard, because they are on the verge of not working; if the recipe is bad in itself (and yours looks suspicious), it won't work even as it is. Try using more egg white (not whipping), some xanthan and underbake. The result will not be very brownie-like (will be dry), but it will hold together better.
    – rumtscho ♦
    Jul 29, 2012 at 15:43
  • Right the cookbook is pretty good for flourless recipes. I've had some remarkably good things out of it, but I haven't tried a brownie with sugar so I don't know if it works. It does involve whipping the egg white as it happens. I'll work your tips into further experiments.
    – Francis Davey
    Jul 29, 2012 at 17:07

2 Answers 2

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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.

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  • Thanks. I'll have a look for a recipe. Do you know why that works? I.e. what is the apple doing to make the brownie bind together? Is it the water content, the pectin, the acidity or something else?
    – Francis Davey
    Jul 29, 2012 at 8:18
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    I don't know, but I actually realised that I answered somewhat hastily - all the recipes I have seen with apple sauce in them have it as a substitute for fat, not sugar. However, people who are trying to cut down on fat are also often keen on cutting down on sugar as well. So take a recipe (for example: cooks.com/rec/view/0,1662,136191-246199,00.html ) that uses applesauce and an artificial sweetener, and leave out the artificial sweetener?
    – Vicky
    Jul 29, 2012 at 14:13
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    That's OK. I think anyway that it may help. The problem with the link you give is that a lot of "artificial sweeteners" such as Splenda and Equal are actually sugar (dextrose) sweetened with something else (aspartame, sucralose or whatever) so you need less of it to create the same level of sweetness but they are still basically sugar. A cup of Equal is not much different from a cup of sugar and presumably has the same physical affordances.
    – Francis Davey
    Jul 29, 2012 at 15:07
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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.)

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  • Thanks! At the time I was trying to avoid sweetness (and using cacao not chocolate for that reason) so dates would not have been suitable, though interesting. Medjool dates would be very promising if it weren't for the sugar. I rather gave up on this idea at the time, but aquafaba might have been plausible. Eggs too. For other recipes even cocoa butter helped a bit because cacao tends to be sold "dryer".
    – Francis Davey
    Nov 5, 2022 at 12:08

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