This delicious recipe is so quick and easy, you can make it in one saucepan & it hits that chocolate craving, while being a little healthier. The tamari gives the brownies a lovely slightly salty & rich complexity. These brownies are adapted from Hetty McKinnon’s recipe for Flourless Soy Sauce Brownies. I love her recipe and have made it a few times. The main reason I decided to adapt her recipe that uses chocolate & cocoa is that the organic chocolate that I usually buy isn’t available at the moment & I haven’t been able to find an affordable organic substitute, that works well in baked goods. Chocolate is one of those items that is best to buy organic over conventional. Cacao farms use more synthetic pesticides, herbicides & fungicides than any other farming practices apart from cotton. These poisons are systemically toxic to humans.
Instead of chocolate & cocoa, I have used just cacao, also making this recipe much cheaper to make. I prefer cacao to cocoa, cacao refers to cacao beans that have not been roasted, cocoa is made of beans that have been roasted. Polyphenols can be affected by heat processing. Therefore, cacao tends to have a higher nutritional profile. Cacao is a source of Magnesium, calcium, iron, coper, zinc, & arginine, which is necessary for nitric oxide production. Additionally, anti-carcinogenic polyphenols catechin & epicatechin in cacao regulate glucose metabolism as well preventing excessing clotting of blood platelets. When using wholefood ingredients, chocolate desserts can be a really good option & without or the unwanted extras like palm oil, vegetable oil, soy lecithin & artificial flavours that can be found in a lot of pre made chocolates. Sans the premade chocolate, this version ends up being healthier without compromising on the taste.
Ingredients
100g unsalted butter (If you use salted butter, reduce the amount of tamari by half a tbsp)
3/4 cup raw cacao powder
1 cup almond meal
1/2 tsp baking powder
3 large eggs
1 ¼ cup fine organic sugar
¼ cup of rapudura sugar
1 tbsp vanilla extract
1 ½ tbsp of tamari or gluten-free soy sauce
Method
Line a brownie pan with unbleached baking paper (I used a 27.5 x 17.5 x 3.5 pan).
Preheat oven to 180C or 160C fan forced.
Melt butter in saucepan on low-medium heat until melted.
Once melted, take of the heat & add sugar, tamari, vanilla & beat with a wooden spoon until smooth.
In a separate bowl crack in eggs & lightly whisk with a fork & then add to the mixture, mix well.
Add the rest of the ingredients & beat until combined.
Pour the batter into the prepared pan and bake for 20-25 minutes. Its ready when its firm on top & slightly gooey in the middle.
Remove and allow to cool completely in the pan.
Dust with organic icing sugar or cacao.
Store in the fridge for a few hours before cutting into squares.