The Baking Trick For Making Brownies Outdoors
Baking outdoors is not always the easiest thing to do, especially when you consider the fact that most ovens are installed in the kitchen, and disassembling the system is not a task many are up for. Additionally, not everyone has a fully-functional outdoor kitchen that will facilitate outdoor baking. However, if for some reason you have to bake outdoors, you will be pleasantly surprised that your grill can help you achieve exactly that. This is even possible during those times when you are craving warm delicious home-cooked brownies.
While this is true, it is fair to acknowledge that making brownies even in an in-door oven is not the easiest of tasks. Leave fudge brownies too long in the heat, and they will turn into a cake. Take simple brownies out too early, and they're nothing short of a gooey mess. In fact, according to Treehouse Bakery, these are the two top issues that regular home bakers struggle to work around. So how do you pull this recipe off on a grill outdoors? Well, baking on the grill is not entirely impossible. In fact, with the aid of a number of helpful tips and a few tricks up your sleeve, you can pull off what others would consider a baking miracle. Here are a few baking tricks that you can implement when baking on the grill outdoors.
Take the brownies out of the grill earlier
As mentioned before, making brownies requires attention to detail, especially when it comes to timing. When using a grill in the place of an oven, you need to know there is a clear difference when it comes to cooking temperature. According to Iupilon, the main difference between the two is that baking involves a relatively lower controlled temperature for cooking while grilling cooks on direct fire at a higher temperature. Although these two may sound similar in concept, you can almost always expect a difference when it comes to baking your brownies on the grill.
The trick for baking brownies outdoors on the grill is removing your brownies from the heat sooner than you would in the oven. Remember, brownies also need to cool to harden enough before enjoying your gooey treat. What's more, because of the intense heat, the brownies will cook further in their baking tin before they start cooling. Real brownies are tough on the exterior and gooey on the inside, and no one wants to eat an overcooked brownie.
Elevate your baking dish
If you haven't noticed yet, all the hacks for pulling off well-baked brownies on the grill have to do with the temperature. This particular hack is no different either. For the best outcome, Craftsy recommends using indirect heat to bake your brownies. This is particularly important if you want to avoid burning the bottom of the brownies way earlier before it is nice and cooked. Try maintaining a temperature of about 350 F for about 45 minutes while baking. Another way of making sure that the bottoms of your brownies don't burn is by elevating the baking dish.
Doing this will allow heat to circulate around the baking dish evenly creating an oven-like environment on the oven. Of course, this will only work if you have a grill with a hood. The cast iron grates on the grill are not your friend when attempting to bake using a grill. They get hot fast and also hold on to the heat for a long time, which is not ideal for baking. However, combining indirect heating and elevating the baking dish will increase your chances of pulling this outdoor baking trick off successfully. Be sure to use a stable material that will not topple over during the process.
Regulate the temperature to the best of your ability
Since grills are designed to heat up quite fast, you need to be extra careful about the grill temperature, lest you spoil everything. A recipe from BBC Food recommends maintaining a temperature of about 180 C or 350 F when baking brownies. While it is not always possible to have an accurate temperature on the grill, try to the best of your ability to maintain this oven temperature on your grill which will mimic your indoor oven.
Of course, the temperature on the grill will fluctuate since you will be opening and closing the hood of the grill periodically. While there is no one standard way of regulating the temperature for every brand of grill, there is one simple trick you can keep in mind to approximate a precise temperature. In some models, keeping the temperature at the required minimum will mean turning the knob all the way down. Be sure to experiment or better still, do some preparation beforehand just to find that sweet spot where the temperature is as close to the recommended.