Shiny, Gooey Hot Fudge With 2 Ingredients

A Big Little Recipe has the smallest-possible ingredient list and big everything else—flavor, creativity, wow factor. Psst: We don't count water, salt, black pepper, and certain fats (specifically, 1/2 cup or less of olive oil, vegetable oil, and butter), since we're guessing you have those covered. Today, we’re turning two pantry staples into a dreamy dessert sauce.

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“When I imagined the perfect hot fudge,” David Lebovitz writes in The Perfect Scoop, “I envisioned it being gooey, shiny, silky smooth, and full of deep, dark chocolate flavor.” And I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Hot fudge sundaes took hold in the U.S. at the turn of the 20th century, largely at soda fountains and drugstores. But while Americans today readily associate this chocolatey sauce with ice cream—and sherbet and sorbet and summer and happiness—this recipe was likely born from an oh fudge! moment. (Sorry, couldn’t help myself.)

According to a blog post by award-winning cookbook author, Nancy Baggett:

It’s a good bet that the first hot fudge sauces resulted from early fudge failures. Fudge-making—a traditional American activity—started catching on at several New England women’s colleges in the late 19th century. Sometimes, when the mixture wasn’t cooked enough, it wouldn’t set and had to be eaten with a spoon.

And who’s going to complain about that?

If you’re new to fudge-making, here’s the gist: Boil ingredients like milk, butter, sugar, and chocolate to the softball stage (candy lingo for 235°F to 240°F), cool to around 120°F, then hand-whip until smooth. Undershoot the initial temperature and the fudge will never set. Overshoot and it’ll turn out dry.

Luckily, hot fudge is more forgiving. Considering that it materialized from shoddy candy-making, it makes sense that, all these years later, most hot fudge recipes require no thermometer and, frankly, no skill. The technique can be as simple as: Dump ingredients in a pot, stir over modest heat, and pour on top of the nearest scoop of ice cream.

Which brings us to those ingredients. Here are the usual suspects, culled together from several popular recipes: heavy cream, brown sugar, granulated sugar, light corn syrup, bittersweet or semisweet chocolate, cocoa powder, water, unsalted or salted butter, vinegar, vanilla extract.

The light corn syrup works to “prevent the mixture from becoming too grainy, but may also inhibit candying by trapping excess moisture,” writes Florence Fabricant in a 1990 review of a book all about fudge. But this Big Little Recipe needs no corn syrup. Or brown sugar, or granulated sugar, or cocoa powder, or heavy cream, or butter.

Sweetened condensed milk and chocolate take care of everything.

I first stumbled upon this approach via Eagle Brand, when developing a sundae years ago. Maybe you’ve seen something similar on The Pioneer Woman.

Simply milk and sugar, reduced until 60 percent of the water evaporates, sweetened condensed milk is, yes, sweet and milky. But as Stella Parks notes on Serious Eats, “Maillard browning creates this beautiful complexity, giving it a toasty, toffee-like character.” Which means this ingredient not only contributes hot fudge’s gooey, ganache-esque consistency, but it also brings a more complex flavor than fresh dairy.

Now onto the chocolate: In the other two-ingredient hot fudge recipes I’ve seen, semisweet chocolate—interchangeable with bittersweet, usually ranging between 35 to 60 percent cacao—is the default (I suspect because most American desserts swing toward the sugary end of the spectrum). But because sweetened condensed milk is plenty, well, sweet, you can sub in chocolate that’s totally unsweetened, and end up with something even better. Unsweetened chocolate just brings chocolatey-ness—yielding a hot fudge that is less cloying, more, dare I say, sultry.

My favorite Big Little ingredient, water, makes the hot fudge pourable. While a small amount of water is infamous for making chocolate seize up, a larger quantity does the opposite. See: Hervé This’ Genius Chocolate Mousse.

From there, you could off-road the recipe however you want. A splash of vanilla extract, sure. Or a spoonful of instant espresso powder, a pinch of cayenne, a pour of bourbon. The paths are endless.

I hope though, at least the first time, you’ll try the bare-bones version, which, even without any flourishes, is still gooey, shiny, silky smooth, and full of deep, dark chocolate flavor.

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