By Claire Burnett, The Current Co-Editor-in-Chief
If you ever want to test your patience, 100-hour brownies might be the way to do it. While normal brownie recipes take 1-2 hours, Alvin Zhou’s recipe for fudgy brownies takes nearly 100 hours. After seeing this recipe recreated by many people on TikTok and YouTube, I decided to put this recipe to the test to see if it was truly worth the 100-hour wait.
On Thursday, April 6th, I started my brownie endeavors. This recipe used many baking techniques that I had never done before, such as browning butter and adding espresso powder to it. Luckily, combining all of the ingredients only took around an hour, and then the batter chilled in the fridge for 72 hours.
On Sunday, April 9th, I took the brownies out of the fridge and put them straight in the oven to bake for 30 minutes. After baking, I covered the brownies in aluminum foil and let them sit in the freezer for 30 minutes, followed by 24 hours in the fridge. Unfortunately, I accidentally prepared the batter in a ceramic 9 x 13 pan, which would have cracked from the shock in the freezer, so I had to take some extra time before baking to transfer the batter into a metal pan of the same size. To avoid my mistake, if you make the recipe at home, make sure you choose a pan that can withstand the thermal shock from a 350 degree oven to a 0 degree freezer.
On Monday, April 10th, I finally tasted the brownies for the first time. These brownies are truly unlike any I have ever had before. The brownies definitely stay true to the “fudgy” part of their name, because if I didn’t make the recipe myself, I would have thought it was fudge, not brownies. Luckily, I prefer fudge over brownies so this part was a huge plus for me. As for the actual taste of the brownies, the espresso powder adds a rich chocolatey taste and the chopped chocolate adds even more delicious flavor and texture to the mix. Also, even though the recipe requires some slightly difficult baking techniques, you can watch Alvin’s step-by-step video to see exactly how to do everything. Despite the good parts of the recipe, some of the drawbacks are that it takes so long to make and wait for the brownies, so if you need to bake something in a short amount of time, this definitely isn’t the ideal recipe. In addition, the recipe requires a lot of chocolate, including 17.5 ounces of 75% dark chocolate and 3.5 ounces of milk chocolate.
Now, for the moment you’ve all been waiting for: are the 100-hour brownies worth the wait? In my opinion, yes, this recipe is worth the wait, but I would not recommend making it often. Even though it takes a while to wait for the final product, the brownies are incredibly rich and delicious. Furthermore, most of the 100 hours is spent waiting while the brownies chill in the fridge and the actual assembling of ingredients is manageable with little baking experience and only takes around an hour. My only problem with waiting so long for the brownies is that they took up a lot of valuable space in my fridge, so I had to time my baking in between grocery shopping trips. Overall, these brownies were a tasty treat that my family and I thoroughly enjoyed, but the waiting time took a little bit too long to justify making them regularly.