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Best. Brownies. Ever.
The highly-respected New York Times recently offered this article featuring the best brownie recipes - ever. Below is an introductory article, followed by three special recipes: New Classic Brownies, French Chocolate Brownies, and Supernatural Brownies. Remember, the better the chocolate, the better the brownies. Enjoy! Simple Pleasure, American Style By Julia Muskin CHOCOLATE has developed a peculiar aftertaste. It isn’t the flavor I find odd; it’s the fetish. The "death by chocolate" desserts and "decadent" chocolate truffles, the "indulgent" chocolate-scented spa treatments and overly intense T-shirt slogans ("I am a woman of many moods — and all of them need chocolate"). Chocolate, a perfectly delicious food, is now saddled with this heavy-breathing reputation. For the home cook, this means built-in performance anxiety. In search of chocolate desserts new and astonishing I have peeled hazelnuts, strained custards, whipped egg whites, and attacked innocent bars of chocolate with a chisel. And then, a couple of years ago, for the first time since elementary school, I made a batch of brownies. I was thunderstruck by how easy they were — and how effectively the modest brownie showcased the quality of fine chocolate, high-fat butter and even artisanal sugar. "There isn’t much to them, is there?" said Dorie Greenspan, whose recent book, "Baking: From My Home to Yours," includes 12 different brownie recipes. "But when they’re done right, you really can’t beat them." Since my epiphany, I have always had an elegant chocolate dessert to fall back on. Today’s brownies, from brilliant pastry minds like Ms. Greenspan, Nick Malgieri and Alice Medrich, bear little resemblance to the tough bake-sale squares of yore: they contain much more chocolate and less flour. Sheila Brass is a culinary historian who, with her sister, Marilynn, wrote "Heirloom Baking With the Brass Sisters" in 2006, which traces the evolution of American baking in the 20th century through their own family history. "Our father loved the Bangor brownies," Ms. Brass said. Some legends place the first brownies in Bangor, Me. The classic recipe, dating to the early 1900s, calls for just two ounces of chocolate. To a modern palate, that amount is practically imperceptible. Older recipes reflect the ingredients of their time, when chocolate for the masses was still new, exotic and relatively expensive. The first American chocolate factories were concentrated in New England, and it was there that the brownie first caught the public imagination, in the 1920s. In later decades, the chocolate level in brownies climbed. The Brass sisters, whom Sheila describes collectively as "roundish and 60-ish," learned to bake from their parents, who were married in 1934. "Then, when we were sweet young things out on our own in the ’60s and ’70s, we started adding more chocolate and more butter to the recipe," she said. The 1970s marked the beginning of the chocolate cult; the term "chocoholic" came into vogue, and the "Cathy" comic strip picked up the thread in the 1980s with endless jokes about chocolate cravings, feeding the image of women — especially lonely single women — with a weakness for the stuff. (I can think of plenty of ’80s trends that haven’t aged well — roasted garlic, for example — but chocolate is the only one that intersects so unpalatably with sexual politics.) The ’80s also brought culture-of-excess creations like the Barefoot Contessa’s Outrageous Brownie and the fudge-frosted Chocolate Orgasm at Rosie’s Bakery in Cambridge, Mass. What is a brownie? Certainly it’s one of the few truly American baking creations to enter the canon — like the blueberry muffin and the chocolate chip cookie. Beyond that, there is no clear point of origin. Most brownie legends begin with an absentminded housewife: stripped down to its essence, a brownie is just a chocolate cake without the baking powder. Although some "cakey" recipes include it, a brownie with baking powder is not really a brownie. "Leavening is about as useful in brownies as it is in mashed potatoes," Nick Malgieri said. In my opinion, the charge of pointless excess also applies to marshmallows, peanut butter, chipotle powder, orange marmalade, cream cheese and most other frills and furbelows. If you feel compelled to tinker, consider upgrading your ingredients instead. I have had spectacular results with cultured butter, Callebaut chocolate and loamy muscovado sugar from the island of Mauritius. Walnuts are fine. Pecans are pushing it. The ideal modern brownie is simple and unadorned, but rigorously designed (like a Diane Von Furstenberg wrap dress). Whether the brownie sits on the fudgy or the cakey side of the aisle, its character should come from the underlying structure of flour, sugar, butter, eggs and chocolate, not from shoveling in more fillings, or from deliberate underbaking. (Many recipes recommend this for a fudgy texture, but fudgy and wet are not the same thing.) According to Shirley O. Corriher, the food scientist whose book "BakeWise" promises to end all baking arguments when it is published next year, brownie variations are mostly based on the proportions of fat and flour — and also, crucially, on how long the eggs are beaten. "It’s the little things that matter in baking," she said. "Everyone is obsessed with that crackly, crinkly crust on the top of a brownie, and you can only get that if you don’t beat the eggs. But if you don’t beat the eggs, you have to get your lift from somewhere else, don’t you?" Fortunately, civilian bakers do not have to master the technicalities. Good brownie recipes abound, and all you have to do is follow them. For a soft, light, buttery brownie, I like Dorie Greenspan’s French Chocolate Brownie; for a brownie almost as dark and dense as a chocolate truffle, there is Alice Medrich’s innovative method for New Classic Brownies: the pan goes directly from a high-heat oven to a bath of ice water, and the just-baked batter slumps, becoming concentrated and intense. However, I would maintain that the best of both worlds is achieved only by the Supernatural Brownie, the one that made me a convert. It is an accidental creation by Mr. Malgieri, who (in a rare human moment for a pastry chef) once forgot to double the flour when baking his own fudge brownie recipe. He also adds a measure of brown sugar to the basic formula. The experts are divided as to whether the brown sugar actually contributes flavor or simply makes the brownie moister (molasses, which makes brown sugar brown, is powerfully hydrophilic). It’s my belief that the slightly bitter taste of molasses acts as an invisible enhancer to the chocolate. The result is as complex and sophisticated as any terrine or truffle I have ever produced. Perhaps the surest sign of the elevated status of the brownie is that it is now taken seriously by French pastry chefs. "Hermé was quite determined to master the brownie," said Ms. Greenspan, who lives part time in Paris and worked with the celebrated pastry chef Pierre Hermé on his book "Chocolate Desserts." "It’s hip to make things that are considered ‘not French,’ although I would argue that the brownie actually has a French ancestor, a simple chocolate cake called fondant that is one of the few things the French actually bake at home." (A magnificently dark chocolate fondant available in the United States is the Belgian brownie sold at Pain Quotidien bakeries.) "American-style" coffee shops began showing up in Paris about a decade ago (finally making it possible to get a cup of coffee to go) and "les brownies," along with "les coukies" and "le crumble," became instantly fashionable. However, it seems that there are certain cultural and culinary barricades to authenticity. "French brownies remain depressingly hard and dry, and too neat: no crumbly edges, no rough surfaces," reported a Paris-based American friend I sent on a scouting trip. She found one brownie that almost passed muster, but decided that the hazelnuts — a very French addition — were excessively big and too rich. "As the French say," she wrote, "C’est too much." New Classic Brownies Adapted from "Alice Medrich’s Cookies and Brownies" (Warner Books, 1999) Time: 40 minutes 8 tablespoons unsalted butter 4 ounces unsweetened chocolate 1 1/4 cups sugar 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 1/4 teaspoon salt 2 eggs 1/2 cup all-purpose flour 2/3 cup lightly toasted walnuts or pecans (optional). 1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Line an 8-inch-square metal baking pan with foil. In top of a double boiler set over barely simmering water, or on low power in a microwave, melt butter and chocolate together. Stir often, and remove from heat when a few lumps remain. Stir until smooth. 2. Stir in sugar, vanilla and salt. Stir in eggs one at a time, followed by flour. Stir until very smooth, about 1 minute, until mixture pulls away from sides of bowl. Add nuts, if using. Scrape batter into prepared pan and bake 20 minutes. 3. Meanwhile, prepare a water bath: Pour ice water into a large roasting pan or kitchen sink to a depth of about 1 inch. Remove pan from oven and place in water bath, being careful not to splash water on brownies. Let cool completely, then lift out and cut into 1-inch squares or wrap in foil. Yield: 16 brownies. French Chocolate Brownies Adapted from "Baking: From My Home to Yours," by Dorie Greenspan (Houghton Mifflin, 2006) Time: 1 1/4 hours 12 tablespoons butter, cut into pieces, plus 1 teaspoon melted butter for brushing pan 1/2 cup all-purpose flour 1/8 teaspoon salt 6 ounces bittersweet chocolate, in pieces 3 eggs 1 cup sugar 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract 2/3 cup lightly toasted walnuts or hazelnuts (optional). 1. Place a rack just below center of oven and preheat to 300 degrees. Line an 8-inch-square pan with foil and brush with melted butter. 2. In a bowl, whisk flour and salt together. In top of a double boiler set over barely simmering water, or on low power in a microwave, melt remaining butter and chocolate together. Stir often and remove from heat when a few lumps remain. Stir until smooth. 3. In a mixer, beat eggs and sugar together until thick and pale yellow. Add chocolate mixture and vanilla and mix at low speed until smooth. Add dry ingredients and mix 30 seconds, then finish mixing by hand, adding nuts if using. Pour into prepared pan and bake 50 to 60 minutes, until top is dry. Let cool in pan, then lift out and cut into bars or wrap in foil. Yield: 12 to 16 brownies. Supernatural Brownies Adapted from "Chocolate: From Simple Cookies to Extravagant Showstoppers," by Nick Malgieri (Morrow Cookbooks, 1998) Time: About 1 hour 2 sticks (16 tablespoons) butter, more for pan and parchment paper 8 ounces bittersweet chocolate 4 eggs 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 cup dark brown sugar, such as muscovado 1 cup granulated sugar 2 teaspoons vanilla extract 1 cup flour 1/2 cup chopped walnuts or 3/4 cup whole walnuts, optional. 1. Butter a 13-by-9-inch baking pan and line with buttered parchment paper. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. In top of a double boiler set over barely simmering water, or on low power in a microwave, melt butter and chocolate together. Cool slightly. In a large bowl or mixer, whisk eggs. Whisk in salt, sugars and vanilla. 2. Whisk in chocolate mixture. Fold in flour just until combined. If using chopped walnuts, stir them in. Pour batter into prepared pan. If using whole walnuts, arrange on top of batter. Bake for 35 to 40 minutes or until shiny and beginning to crack on top. Cool in pan on rack. Yield: 15 large or 24 small brownies. Note: For best flavor, bake 1 day before serving, let cool and store, tightly wrapped. Courtesy of the New York Times
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Hal & Jean Ward,