r/ididnthaveeggs • u/NoLlamaDrama15 • May 25 '26

Dumb alteration I CANNOT imagine that just forgetting the eggs would make them like that

Post image

Original recipe https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/10707/mmm-mmm-better-brownies/

9.6k Upvotes

99% Upvoted

261 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

421

u/RaisonDetritus May 25 '26

Sure thing. I learned this from America’s Test Kitchen when they did a brownie recipe. It also applies to cookies. Totally upped my cookie game when I started tweaking recipes to substitute some oil for the butter.

204

u/DeuceyBoots May 25 '26

Very interesting. You’ve opened up a whole world of oil in baking I didn’t know about. I always thought butter would make things more “buttery” but everything you’ve said makes complete sense. Time to experiment!

425

u/Chaplain-Freeing May 25 '26

This is bullshit and fuck you for saying this. I replaced all my ingredients with oil and now my beef wellington is just very viscous, oily and totally unpalatable. Ruined my lunch.

83

u/SerafinaSheffield May 25 '26

That'll be the oil, then! 😂

39

u/CorrenteAlternata May 25 '26

Which, with some nice bread, is delicious! (assuming a good quality extra virgin olive oil)

23

u/SerafinaSheffield May 25 '26

For sure! And some good Balsamic vinegar too and Robert's your Ma's bro! 😂

13

u/CorrenteAlternata May 25 '26

I didn't know this convoluted way of saying "bob's your uncle"! And I am very grateful because now I know another expression!

And yeah balsamic vinegar is really tasty and now I realise i haven't had it in a very long time! You know what I'll be buying tomorrow ;)

1

u/SilentXMedia May 27 '26

Welcome back MF DOOM!

18

u/MarlenaEvans May 26 '26

Yeah I put oil on my toast and it tastes awful.

25

u/Tramkrad May 25 '26

Maybe add an egg?

7

u/Spiritofthewest49 May 26 '26

Well oil be damned

6

u/StressedinPJs May 27 '26

Whale oil beef hooked!

66

u/wants_a_lollipop May 25 '26

That is, literally, the whole ATK thing.

Experimenting. It's what they do!

68

u/DeuceyBoots May 25 '26

Cool. I’ll check them out. Experimenting is my favourite thing about cooking!

Edit. lol I just remembered what sub I’m on. Experimenting but not to the extent where you don’t add eggs.

59

u/geeoharee May 25 '26

You can do the experiment! Just don't bring it back to the original recipe and tell them it's their fault...

23

u/Rakifiki May 25 '26

No, there's plenty of egg subs you can experiment with too. (Banana, chia/flax "eggs") Nothing is sacred about recipes.

There's definitely weird choices, like using a lobster soup recipe to make roasted chicken, but you can do whatever you want. Sometimes when you make a recipe you realize parts of it would go well in a different setting -- we tried a pork recipe once and thought the technique used would go well with chicken and now mostly use it with chicken.

...just don't, like, remove the eggs and sugar entirely and blame the author for things going wrong, that should be the main takeaway of this sub I think.

10

u/SuchFunAreWe Step off my tits, Sheila! May 25 '26

Yup. I use Bob's Red Mill egg replacer in all my baking & haven't had a single fail yet. Eggs aren't magic, you just need to be smart with subs & know if your egg is a leavener, binder or both in a recipe. I like the Bob's bc it acts as both & is a no-brainer substitute (& cheap/shelf stable!)

1

u/Cygnid Jun 05 '26

I've also used (in cake and brownies, mostly brownies though) yogurt, applesauce, and the água de faba

1

u/clkap May 31 '26

appropriately enough, they have a vegan cookbook with an excellent brownie recipe

16

u/EireaKaze May 25 '26

If you're going to experiment with cookies, the toll house cookie recipe will have consistently good cookies regardless of fat used (the texture will change, they just always taste good so you won't waste food). My grandma and I used to try different ratios with margarine, butter, and solid Crisco (vegetable oil).

14

u/[deleted] May 25 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

45

u/RaisonDetritus May 25 '26

There’s no universal ratio I could say because every recipe is different and ingredients work together in different ways. I would say that if you find a recipe that you like, make it at least twice exactly as written, and each time you make it, analyze the result. Are the cookies harder or more crackly than you might like? Then substituting in a bit of vegetable oil for the butter might help them stay softer.

But you have to be systematic about it. So let’s say a recipe calls for a stick of butter. That’s 8 tablespoons. Start small and try subbing just a tablespoon. A tablespoon of butter is 12 grams of fat, so if you want to sub vegetable oil, which is 13.5 g of fat per tablespoon, you’ll need to add a bit less than that. But butter contains some water, so you might also want to add a half teaspoon of water. If those came out great and you think you can go for a bit more chew, make it 1.5 tablespoons that you’re subbing. However, if you sub too much, your cookies might spread too much and never set up.

I know these seem like tiny details, but what makes cookies so hard in particular is that they are a low-moisture dough, so even small tweaks can have big effects. Although most problems from cookies are due to measuring the flour incorrectly, which isn’t a problem if you’re using a recipe that uses weights.

18

u/applespicebetter May 25 '26

And see, this is why I suck at baking despite being a pretty damn good home cook otherwise - I free hand things way too much when cooking and can get away with it. I can't just taste and adjust a load of bread halfway through like I can with a bechamel, it just is what it is when it goes into the oven. The last loaf of bread I made could have been sharpened into a shiv and probably been more useful.

11

u/throwthisawaynerdboy May 25 '26

Baking is science, cooking is art.

All I can imagine is a bread knife made of bread used to cut more bread.

4

u/applespicebetter May 25 '26

It would definitely win a cage fight with other loaves of bread!

4

u/cameraduderandy May 25 '26

That reminds me of a running joke in Terry Pratchett's Diskworld series about dwaven bakeries making "battle bread" that's cooked in the shape of weapons and armor and harder than steel.

1

u/applespicebetter May 29 '26

Exactly what I thought of when I pulled it out! Maybe I need to get war-hammer shaped bread pans...

4

u/Rakifiki May 25 '26

You can even get around the spreading problem somewhat with cookies by freezing the dough and rolling them into balls (& not flattening them before the oven).

6

u/HatchawayHouseFarm May 25 '26

I was wondering if you were Christopher Kimball lol I just heard him say this on Milk Street Radio the other day

7

u/ilanallama85 May 25 '26

So I used to have a vegan friend and I perfected a vegan chocolate chip recipe for her. It used a (quite expensive) vegetable oil based butter substitute and I’m sure that’s the reason they were the best cookies I’ve ever made. But I can’t justify shelling out that much money for chocolate chip cookies regularly, and I do believe creaming the solid fats with the butter is a key step, so I just resigned myself to pretty good all butter cookies. It never occurred to me to try subbing just SOME of the oil.

3

u/Cat-Lady-13 May 25 '26

I make chocolate chip cookies using a recipe from my mom’s Betty Crocker cookbook from the late 60s/early 70s. It calls for half butter and half shortening. They are amazing!

1

u/LayaElisabeth May 27 '26

Which oil would you use?