How to Make Box Brownies Fudgy: 3 Online Hacks, Tested & Reviewed

How We Tested the Box Brownie Hacks:

We used the same Duncan Hines Dark Chocolate Fudge Brownie Mix for each batch, preparing one as the box intended (our control group), and three using a different online hack, which you’ll see outlined below. Most box brownies call for three extra ingredients—water, oil and egg—so we focused on one hack for each. (All four received half a cup of semisweet chocolate chips added to the batter—one tablespoon on top, the rest mixed into the batter—as a baseline addition. Because who doesn’t love pockets of molten chocolate in their brownies, especially when fudgy is the end goal?)

Once baked, we served all four types of brownies to ten people—without telling them which is which or what the hacks were—and asked them to provide tasting notes as well as their picks for the fudgiest and their overall favorite.

Why People Recommend It: As Martha Stewart taught us, if you want to make brownies taste fudgier, you’ll need a higher fat-to-flour ratio. You’ll get about 2.8 grams of fat from a third of a cup of milk, versus zero from water, so this is an easy way to boost it.

The Verdict: If you’re not the type to down an entire pan of brownies in one day (those people exist, right?), this is the hack for you. These brownies didn’t dry out as quickly as the others and had an almost creamy, gooey consistency with crispy edges.

Why People Recommend It: Butter has fewer grams of fat than vegetable oil (184 vs. 224 grams per cup, to be exact), but it does offer a richer flavor. And, when melted, you don’t have to worry about aerating the butter, or creating little pockets of air that make the dessert fluffier (which is good for cakes, not so good when you want fudgy brownies).

The Verdict: These brownies baked the most evenly (seriously, we wanted to put a level on ‘em—no doming or deflating) and were the most brownie batter-like in their final flavor. The butter gave them more of a standout sweet-to-salty ratio, making ‘em reviewers’ favorite batch overall.

Why People Recommend It: A whopping 99 percent of an egg’s fat is in the yolk, so if you want a fudgier brownie, it makes sense you’d want to get the most fat possible from an egg.

The Verdict: This technique yielded the densest, chewiest brownies. If you’re looking for a hearty brownie you can really sink your teeth into, try this hack.

The Winner: The melted butter hack was testers’ overall favorite, in terms of how fudgy it tasted and its overall depth of flavor. However, by day three, people preferred how gooey the milk-based brownies were.

Naturally, this posed the question: If you want the absolute fudgiest brownies ever, why not do all three? Or a combination of two? You certainly could, but in the interests of preserving our arteries—particularly after seeing the grease stains the “hacked” brownies left on a sheet of paper, post-tasting—we decided to stick to one. But don’t let us hold you back—live your fudgin’ best life, friends.