Mmm...Brownies!
Brownie mix is starting to worry me. Maybe not the classy brands like Girardelli, which still require you to add an egg and some oil, but definitely anything in the Betty Crocker tier, where you just add water.
I like my brownies heavy and moist, the consistency of clay. Every time we cut a new brownie out, a little dough sticks to the knife. Since a knife doesn’t need to be sharp to cut mere brownies, we usually just leave it in the cake pan. Unless that knife gets washed soon afterwards, the dough on the flat of the blade hardens to an unbelievably tough residue. It won’t yield to a scrubber, or to a fingernail. It will break, but only if you whack it good and hard. Fortunately, it softens readily under the faucet, and comes right off.
But here’s the weird part: if you let the knife soak carefully, rather than scrubbing it directly in water, the dough gradually soaks through and returns to a pasty substance just like the raw mix, once you stir the water in. Tastes the same. Feels the same. So does the gooey film left behind in the pan, and the crumbs, too, if you take the time to dry and pulverize them first.
Real dough does not behave like this. If you add water to some old bread crumbs, you don’t get a stretchy dough back out of it. If you rehydrate a pie crust, you don’t get something you can shape with a rolling pin. Oh, no. What we’re dealing with here isn’t real food. It’s cement.
The mechanism of cement is nifty. Add just enough water to pulverized rock to let it slop around. The water acts as an adhesive, to keep the dust from falling apart or blowing away in the wind. More importantly, it also acts as a lubricant, allowing the tiny rock particles to slide around one another so the cement can pour into whatever mold you have handy. Now, drain out the water. As the water drains, the particles or rock gradually settle up against one another. If you drain the water slowly and gently enough, the particles have the leisure to fit together…just…so. On a microscopic level, a near maximum of each particle’s surface comes into contact with other particles, with almost no space wasted between them. This allows every microscopic cranny to press into the surface of neighboring particles, catching in a manner similar to Velcro. When the last of the water goes, the tiny irregularities in every grain’s surface have become wedged into another grain’s irregularities. Voila! Rock dust now behaves (almost) like a solid stone block.
And that’s what we’re eating in brownies-from-a-box: chocolate-flavored cement. The likeness of a good brownie to clay is no accident. Presumably, you could dehydrate and rehydrate the mix all day without any appreciable effect, making brownies over and over from the same mix. I wonder whether Betty Crocker and company need to make them from actual food ingredients. Couldn’t some carefully chosen river silt, or even plastic, do just as well, with no calories for the diet-conscious? And then I wonder whether they already have.