Is Ina Garten's Brownie Pudding Up To the Hype?

Greetings, my beautiful lovelies. It's Emmy. How are you? It's great to see you and welcome back. Today, we're going to be making Ina Garten's brownie pudding. It looks absolutely delicious. It looks super simple. And several of you have gotten in touch with me requesting to make this one. And it's chocolate and it's pudding and it's by Ina. So yes, yes, and yes. If you're not familiar with Ina Garten, she is absolutely lovely. She is also known as the Barefoot Contessa. Ina Garten is an absolute inspiration. She's smart. She's savvy. She's a cookbook author, cooking show host, a stellar cook, a business person. She's just brilliant. And she does it all with a ton of warmth. And I love that. So today we're going to be making her brownie pudding, which looks like it's exactly what it says, a hybrid between a brownie and a pudding. It's served warm or room temperature, but it's going to have a softer consistency than a brownie, but have all of the buttery, chocolatey goodness of a brownie, but a consistency more like a pudding. And she says it's one of her husband, Jeffrey's favorite desserts. And in fact, made it in one of her episodes of Barefoot Contessa for their anniversary. And that episode was dated from 2007. So I love that this recipe is getting some love. So let's go ahead and get started. I've got my oven preheating at 325 degrees. And let's go ahead and make the brownie batter. So this is called a brownie pudding because it has all of the ingredients in a typical brownie, but the consistency is going to be more pudding-like. And speaking of brownies, I've got two sticks of melted butter here in this great big bowl. And I a hundred percent agree with Ina that all good brownie recipes begin with butter. In fact, I believe every single brownie recipe should have butter because I feel like that's a key component to a good tasting brownie. Butter, not only the chocolate, but butter in particular. Love it. So I love brownies. I fell in love with brownies thanks to Mrs. Fields. I would go to the mall on occasion with my mom and as a treat, I would get the double chocolate brownie and I would nurse that baby. I would just take the little bits and roll them into balls. I remember just like nursing that one little brownie because we never really had brownies around the house, but when mom went shopping, she knew to keep me happy. She'd get me a brownie and I was content. So two sticks of melted butter. And to that, we're going to add two cups of sugar. Lots of sugar. Right into the bowl. So I'm gonna begin mixing this. First at low and then increase the speed to medium. And then we're gonna add four eggs, another key component to brownies. I would say typically for most brownie recipes, it would be about three eggs, but we're using four because we're making a pudding. So gonna beat this up initially and then add my eggs in one at a time. We want this to get light yellow in color and have a ribbony texture. Here we go. I'm gonna pause this for a second so I can scrape down the sides. Now the original recipe says to do this in a stand mixer, but you can't see as well when I use a stand mixer. So I'm opting to use a hand mixer. All right, now let's go ahead and prepare the rest of our ingredients. Wow, that's so luscious. It's gorgeous. Now we're going to add the contents of one vanilla bean. Here is a vanilla bean. It's kind of like a dried up stick or something, but this precious thing is so aromatic. It is the fruit with pod of a vanilla plant, which is actually an orchid. So gorgeous. I've been wanting to try to grow a vanilla orchid for a long time, but there's just so much work just to get this one vanilla pod. So your orchid, of course, has to grow well. And then you have to pollinate it ever so carefully. And then it produces one of these. And then it stays on the plant for, I think almost a year before it is ready to harvest. Now taking this out of the bottle has perfumed my entire kitchen with the smell of vanilla. But what we want is what's inside of this bean, as they call it, and that's the vanilla seeds. So what you do is you take a paring knife and you score the vanilla pod, and then you scrape the contents. And inside the pod are the vanilla seeds. So open it up and then scrape all that goodness. And that, those are the vanilla seeds. That's what you'll find in some ice creams. Oh, it smells so good. So do not throw this away. There's still tons of flavor in it. You can put it in some sugar and get some vanilla sugar, or you can do what Ina does and add it to your collection of vanilla pods that you've got soaking in some vodka. I think she's had that jar for 20 or 30 years and she just keeps adding vanilla pods to it and makes her own vanilla extract. It's really great. It's like this like clamp glass jar that she's got going. Goals, man, goals, goals, goals. So besides the vanilla, we're also going to flavor our brownie with this. And this is foie gras. It is a raspberry flavored liqueur. This one is Chambord. Look how cute this bottle is. So sticky and cute. Look at the top. So fancy. And I've never had foie gras before. So let's give it a taste. Ooh. It definitely smells raspberry. Mm-hmm. Beautiful color, of course. So let's just give it a taste. Cheers. Oh yeah. It tastes raspberry-ed. A little bit sweet. A little bit of like a honey-sweet vanilla flavor to it. Not sure what I'm gonna do with the rest of this, but I'm gonna add a tablespoon to this. A tablespoon of foie gras. Ina says this is a secret ingredient. Doink. Give this a quick mix. Okay. Looks like a luscious cake batter. So now we need our dry ingredients. We need three quarters of a cup of cocoa powder. Now the recipe does not specify whether we're using Dutch process or natural, so I'm going to do a combination of both. And whenever I use cocoa powder, I like to sift it because it tends to get lumpy. Natural chocolate, or just regular unsweetened cocoa powder, is a little bit acidic. While Dutch process, or it's also called European style, cocoa powder has been alkalized, so it has more of a basic pH to it, and therefore will react a little bit differently if you're using baking soda or baking powder. In this case, I don't think it matters so much because we're not using any of those leaveners, but Dutch process cocoa powder tends to be a little bit darker, and some say has a richer chocolatey flavor. So you can see the difference in the color here. So I'm gonna use a combination of both here. Plus a half cup of all-purpose flour. Put that in there as well. We're just gonna sift that into our wet ingredients. See, that's the reason why we sift. See all those balls of cocoa powder? Want this all to be broken up. Now, I'm gonna just fold our dry ingredients in here. A, because my mixer will make this fly all over the place, and B, just wanna be gentle. We're not making a chewy elastic dough here, we're making a dessert. So, just fold everything in. So, there's our chocolate pudding. Well, it looks like chocolate pudding, but it's our brownie batter. Okay, so I've got an oval casserole dish here that I am liberally buttering with a piece of butter here so that our brownie will not stick. So, lots of chunky butter. Now we're going to transfer this beautiful stuff into here. You would probably pour this, but since I'm doing this one-handed, this is what we're doing. Now we just work this into our dish in an even layer. Next, we're gonna bake this in a preheated 325 degree Fahrenheit oven for one hour. But before we do that, we are going to put it in a water bath, a bain-marie, so I'm gonna use this dish. I'm gonna take this to my oven, place this on the rack, then place the brownie inside, and then I'm gonna fill this up with hot water, hot, hot tap water. It's gonna go about an inch up the sides of the pan. It will help temper the heat. It'll give it a kind of drental heat because it's in the water bath. So once this has been in the oven for an hour, once we insert a toothpick, it should still come out wet, but remember this is a pudding, totally a-okay. Then we're gonna take the whole thing out of the oven and then take the brownie out of the water bath and then we can serve it warm or let it cool down to room temperature a bit before we serve it. So lovelies, I'm gonna go ahead and do that and I will see you in about an hour. See you in a little bit. Alrighty lovelies, I'm back with our brownie pudding and it looks fantastic. Look, it's got that nice shiny shell that I associate with a brownie, but when I poked it with a toothpick, it was still very much kind of soft in the middle. The instructions say when you poke it with a toothpick, it should come out three quarters clean. Whatever that means, it means that it should be still kind of wet. Also, when I reread the instructions, I did a bit of a snafu when I was mixing things in terms of the order. You're supposed to mix the eggs with the sugar and beat that until it's in a ribbony stage, not with the butter. You're supposed to add the butter at the end after you have sifted in your dry ingredients and then as everything is mixing, you're supposed to slowly add the butter. So, didn't do that quite to plan, but it looks great and I'm hoping that it doesn't affect the finished results, which I don't think it will. We're not making a cake here. It's not rocket science. I got the flamboise, which I think was a pretty key component, although it might not be. I'm very curious to see if I can taste it at all amidst all of the cocoa and butter, but enough chit-chat. Let's go ahead and give it a taste. Got a plate here. Let's tuck into this. Oh, that looks very promising. Oh, yeah. Look at that. Alrighty, lovelies, this looks amazing. You've got this glossy, shiny, crisp top that I associate with a brownie, but then you've got this luscious, wet lava cake in the middle. Look at that, shiny, gorgeous. Okay, I'm gonna have a bite with everything. To Ina. Itadakimasu. Mm. Oh, that's good. So first you taste the butter, then you taste the chocolate, which isn't too chocolaty, and it has the most marvelous texture. The top has a nice, crunchy layer to it. You have to kind of break it a little bit. And then beneath it, you've got this brownie-tasting base, but it has the most luscious texture. This tastes like a purposely under-baked brownie, but with intention. The top has a marvelous crust on it, and the bottom doesn't taste raw at all. It's fully cooked. And it is gooey, but it's fully cooked. It doesn't taste raw or feel raw in your mouth. And it's slightly warm. I love this temperature. And I completely understand why Ina recommends having this with vanilla ice cream. It would be this wonderful combination of almost like chocolate fudge. The texture is different, but it's got a kind of a fluffiness to it too. Can you hear that? It's like sticky, but it's fluffy. And I think I do detect the flamboise in there. Although I don't think I would be able to tell you exactly what that flavor is, but there is something in there that makes it a little bit, a little tiny bit different, more complex. Delicious. This is a showstopper. Fan-stinkin'-tastic. Serve this to people who appreciate and love chocolate. They will be so, so very pleased. 100% would make again. And 100 million% up to the hype. Alrighty, my lovelies. There you have it. Thanks so much for watching. I hope you enjoyed that one. I hope you learned something. Please share this video with your friends. Follow me on social media. Like this video. Subscribe. And I shall see you in the next one. Toodaloo. Take care. Bye! Oh my gosh. I'm gonna eat this entire thing. So good. Can't stop.