I’m a sucker for a baking hack, especially one that promises to make box mix brownies even fudgier. It’s a weakness, really—as soon as I hear it, I can’t wait to try it. I’ve tested all kinds of varieties over the years, from substituting bread flour to replacing the liquid ingredients with everything from milk to melted butter.

But the latest one had me envisioning cavities before I even picked up the Ghirardelli mix. I’m talking about the TikTok-viral sweetened condensed milk hack, where you ignore the box’s instructions and combine your go-to mix with one egg and a can of sweetened condensed milk and bake it to set-in-the-middle, crackly topped perfection. Check it out:

So, How Do Sweetened Condensed Milk Brownies Taste?

It was the sweetness of the condensed milk that concerned me; I worried it’d turn things cloying.

Spoiler, dear reader: It kind of did, but that wasn’t the real problem with this recipe. The texture was the true issue. They were fudgy, yes, with an intense sweet-yet-still-cocoa-forward flavor, but they were also quite sticky, like the brownie equivalent of a Riesen chocolate-caramel candy that gets lodged in your molars mid-bite. Everyone who tried one found themselves picking their teeth afterward—and washing their hands.

Does Sweetened Condensed Milk Make Brownies Fudgier?

As I learned when researching and testing fudgy brownie hacks for PureWow, increasing the fat-to-flour ratio results in gooier, denser treats. But here’s the interesting thing: With this hack, you’re actually incorporating fewer total grams of fat than if you stuck to the mix’s instructions. Despite the fact that you’re trading 4.66 ounces of liquid (1/3 cup of vegetable oil and 1/4 cup water, if we use Ghirardelli’s Double Chocolate Brownie Mix, for example) for a 14-ounce can of sweetened condensed milk.

You’re still getting plenty of fat to lock in moisture and create a dense dessert, but it’s the viscosity of the sweetened condensed milk that really creates that fudge-like quality (fittingly so, since the ingredient is crucial for most fudge recipes!). To make sweetened condensed milk, half of its water is removed, and sugar is added to preserve it (unlike evaporated milk, which doesn’t contain sugar). This makes it a silky, creamy binder that works well in brownies and helps make the treats even denser and gooier.

But that additional sugar also leads to the sticky factor, which I didn’t love.

What Hack Would I Recommend Instead?

If you’re baking from scratch, I recommend swapping all-purpose flour for bread flour, which has higher protein content and yields more elasticity to the dough. As long as you don’t overbake ’em, they’ll be chewy, gooey and fudgy—without tasting like straight-up fudge.

If you’re using a box mix, try substituting the vegetable oil for melted butter. You’ll get a fudgy-but-still-brownie-like consistency (without the sticky factor) and a greater depth of flavor, especially if you try salted butter. I know, I know—but every baking recipe calls for unsalted!—here, I suggest deviating, just because the salt further intensifies the cocoa flavor and tempers the sugary sweetness.