My Best-Ever Brownies 2.0

How I changed an iconic recipe

Well, it’s Pride. The federal government is siccing the military on civilians in California, whether they’re protesting or picking strawberries. Yesterday, a sitting senator was tackled and detained by Trump administration agents for asking a question. Tomorrow, the president will throw a North Korea-style, $45-million military parade that just so happens to also be his 79th birthday party. And the US might get pulled into World War III because of an out-of control, war-hungry state and some botched nuclear deal negotiations.

I’ve been trying to focus on local things that feel less intractable than all these other terrors. If you pay any attention to my Instagram Stories, you’ll know Assembly Member Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for NYC mayor is giving me a sliver of hope. He is in a shockingly good position to beat serial-sexual harrasser (according to Biden’s DOJ) former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, but they are still neck-and-neck when rank choice voting polls are played through. I just phone-banked for him and it felt great. It gave, for a fleeting moment, the sensation of agency and control that is so foreign at this juncture in history. If you can volunteer (you don’t have to live in NYC to phonebank!) or donate, I encourage it.

There’s still one more day to register to vote in New York (if you are changing your registration to New York). Early voting starts tomorrow June 14 and goes until the 22nd. Election Day is Tuesday, June 24! If you’re a registered Democrat in New York City, fill out all 5 mayoral spots for ranked-choice voting, and don’t rank Cuomo at all.

This Week’s Recipe

It is pretty rare that I return to a recipe and overhaul it. I’ve only done it with a handful of them: my best-ever chocolate chip cookies, my chewy snickerdoodles, and now my best-ever brownies, the original of which I’m keeping here for posterity. Obviously when I publish a recipe, I’m confident that it’s the best it can be at that point. But with more years of experience comes more understanding of ingredients, their functions, their interactions; of new methods and techniques; and of what I truly want from a recipe, including both the process and the finished product.

Recipes are organic. They change the moment someone reads them and gets to work, even if they follow them word for word. Because of small (okay, sometimes big) differences in kitchens, climates, available ingredients, tools, ovens, instincts, experience … 10 people can make the same recipe and still finish with 10 different results. And, of course, we know that most people people rarely follow recipes word for word. All this to say, if I can evolve and grow, so can my recipes.

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So what was the problem with the OG best-ever brownies? The flavor was great thanks to rich Dutch process cocoa and espresso powder. The texture was not too fudgey, not too cakey; baked but just barely enough so you still leave teeth marks. (Side note: you can read my diatribe on the word fudgey here. TLDR: when people say fudgey they usually just mean slightly underbaked and packed with melty chocolate, which is FINE but that’s not what fudge tastes or feels like.)

There was simply too much going on in this recipe for an end result as simple as brownies — a treat most people want to bring to the bake sale last-minute or to satisfy a late-night craving. In the previous iteration of this recipe, I asked you to brown a stick of butter. But after making a batch with and without the golden ingredient, I could barely perceive its nutty, toffee-like flavor at all, so I thought why are we bothering? Let’s just melt the butter in the microwave and get on with our lives.

In some brownie recipes, chocolate chips seem to play a role in producing that shiny, paper-tin top crust everyone wants. Here’s an excerpt from the previous best-ever brownies post:

Chocolate chips. This excellent article from PJ Hamel at King Arthur Baking has helped me a lot in my shiny-top quest. For some recipes, like the one she uses, the difference really boils down to whether or not chocolate chips were included. I am not a scientist so I’m not sure exactly what’s going on here, but the batches I made with chocolate chips have a shinier, papery top than the ones that didn’t.

For my most recent test, I also used a technique I learned from the blog Philosophy of Yum to really make that top crust shiny (although, it was already pretty flaky and shatter-y by simply mixing the chips in at the end.) For this final batch, I melted about 1/4 cup of the chocolate chips into the hot butter, added about 3/4 cup to the finished batter, then sprinkled a few over top, popped the tin in the oven for just a minute, then smeared the melted chips into the top.

This recipe still calls for melted chocolate chips in the batter, but I’m pretty capable of saying at this point that the smearing melted chocolate on top of the brownies was probably overkill. Not to mention, for me personally, I prefer the taste of brownies un-muddled by the overpowering bittersweetness and creaminess of chocolate chips, and prefer to savor the chewy texture with no interruptions from rock solid or melty pockets of chocolate.

Besides, the thing that really makes a difference, you can’t get around it, is dissolving the sugar. From the original post:

The most obvious and the one that everyone agrees on is sugar being dissolved in the moisture of the batter. That’s why many recipes call for cooking sugar in butter or whipping sugar with eggs. In my experience, whipping sugar in eggs does a much better job at fully dissolving the granules. The heat from melting butter helps dissolve some of the sugar, but butter doesn’t have that much water content to start with so it’s not a great vehicle for dissolving sugar.

In the original recipe, I didn’t call for how long to whip the eggs and sugar for; only to whip them until the sugar was dissolved. I think this may have lead to some batches not having as much sugar dissolved as others, leading to less shiny crust on top. I removed the powdered sugar, which, yes, dissolved quickly in the batter, but I had a hunch that the cornstarch content was somehow dulling the shine of the crust. I swapped it for some brown sugar to add a depth of flavor and more chew. All in all, if the eggs and sugar were whipped long enough, removing the powdered sugar didn’t seem to make or break the crust formation.

A photo of the original recipe. You can see the crust is shiny a little unsightly. Milk chocolate chips worked well as mix-ins, which I don’t usually go for.

Thanks to a helpful tip from America’s Test Kitchen, I swapped half of the butter for some vegetable oil. This lead to a chewier final product that reminded me so much of boxed mix, in the best way. (Which makes sense since many box mixes call for neutral oil!) Butter is mostly saturated fat molecules, which are solid at room temperature, whereas vegetable oil is mostly unsaturated fat molecules, which are liquid at room temperature. The all-butter recipe yielded batches that felt fudgier (as in, set up firmer and broke more rigidly like fudge) and the batches with more oil retained their slightly bendy chew for days. Not to mention, the batches with oil held onto their moisture for much longer. However, butter just tastes better, so like with many baked goods, it’s wise to use a balance.

Some final changes: To amp up the chocolate flavor, I doubled the amount of chocolate chips melted into the batter. I also doubled the amount of espresso powder because coffee just makes chocolate taste better. Lastly, I reduced the amount of baking powder since we’re already whipping so much air into the eggs and brownies don’t require that much leavener, if any at all.

That being said, if you like the OG recipe and are sticking by it, more power to you!

My Best Ever Brownies 2.0

Makes 16 large or 25 small brownies

Ingredients