Brown Sugar Brownies
For us, the process of writing a cookbook involves finding the middle ground.
It's ever the dream, no? I once had a discussion once with a sommelier who told me that he tries to gauge the middle bottle of wine and then build the list out from there in both directions. (Unfortunately, he thought the middle bottle ran about $90US. Ah, well!)
When Bruce and I write cookbooks, we also try to figure out that illusive middle. Which recipe stakes it out--and which then have the freedom to break it?
We believe the middle ground is made up of three things: taste, effort, and cost. To give you a little peak into the behind-the-scenes thinking in our latest book, REAL FOOD HAS CURVES, the seven-step plan to get off processed food, we staked out the middle ground with the oven-fried fish fillets, the ones included in the discussion about effort v. cost in our food choices, found in chapter 2, "Make Informed Choices."
We later included far easier and less costly recipes (like the no-cook peach salsa) and more difficult, challenging ones (like the Mapo Dofou--which you can also find on this blog here).
That process is perhaps nowhere more evident than in The Ultimate Brownie Book. So many people have their notion of brownies: there's the caky camp and the fudgy camp, for one thing. So we first sat down to try to find something that fell right in the middle, all other brownies moving out to the edges. And believe me, there some out on the edges. Like the caky brownies made with a can of Coca-Cola, a riff on my Cousin Wilma Faye's "co'-cola cake." (Yes, I had a cousin named Wilma Faye. Doesn't everybody?) Or like the fudgy Sour Cream Brownies. Crazy. Barely holding together in the pan. One minute less baking time and you could use them as an ice cream topping.
So here's the middle ground of brownies, a little bit cakey, a little bit fudgy, with only one kind of chocolate not three or four, certainly indulgent as a treat but not too much so, a little decadent but certainly not too much so.
First, position the rack in the center of the oven. Preheat the oven to 350F. Butter and flour a 9 x 13-inch baking pan.
Next, whisk 1 cup all-purpose flour, 1 teaspoon baking powder, and 1/2 teaspoon salt in a medium bowl.
Now for the real show. Put 2 sticks (1/2 pound) cut-up unsalted butter and 5 ounces chopped unsweetened chocolate in the top half of a double boiler set over about 1 inch of simmering water--or bring about that much water to a simmer in a saucepan and set a large, heat-safe bowl over the top with the butter and chocolate in it, making sure the bowl doesn't touch the simmering water. Reduce the heat to low so the water barely simmers and stir until half the chocolate has melted.
Remove the top half of the double boiler or the bowl from the heat--be careful of escaping steam!--and continue stirring off the heat until the chocolate has fully melted. The whole thing should have a silky sheen, not dull at all. Cool for 10 minutes.
If you've used the top half of a double boiler, scrape the chocolate mixture into a large mixing bowl.
Use an electric mixer at medium speed to beat in 2 cups packed dark brown sugar. It'll give the brownies a deep, molasses taste, somewhat sophisticated, but without the pings of espresso or, say, mint--a kind of middle-of-the-road sophistication.
Continue beating about 3 minutes. The mixture will start to look grainy and almost "broken," barely maintaining its sheen.
Beat in 3 large eggs one at a time, making sure each is fully incorporated before adding the next. The whole thing will start to look more and more like a traditional batter. Beat in 2 teaspoons vanilla extract.
Remove the beaters; scrape any sticky batter on them back into the bowl.
Pour in the prepared flour mixture and stir with a wooden spoon or plastic spatula just until there are no small pockets of undissolved flour in the mixture. Pour and spoon it into the prepared baking pan. The batter's pretty sticky; it'll take some doing to get it to stretch out to the corners of the baking pan.
Bake for about 35 minutes, until a toothpick or cake tester inserted into the center of the brownie cake comes out with a few moist crumbs attached.
Set the pan on a wire rack and cool for 20 or 30 minutes. You can then turn the entire brownie cake out onto a cutting board, slice the brownies into pieces, and reinvert them to serve them. They'll stay at room temperature for three days if sealed in a plastic container between sheets of wax paper--or they'll stay fresh in the freezer for several months.
Mark Scarbrough | Posted on Thursday, July 15, 2010 at 1:13PM | in Cake, Chocolate, Desserts, Fabulously Empty Calories
Reader Comments (10)
OMG you guys. You're killing me! A delicious recipe, for which I have all the ingredients right in my kitchen, but which requires me to heat up the oven? Do you know how hot it is in Georgia right now? How can you hurt me like this? :) :) :)
I don't think I can resist though. Perhaps I'll have a crack at a late-nighter.
Misty: I can't wait to hear what happens!
M.
Ok, well I definitely fired up the old oven last night. Three words: dark chocolate heaven!
I think I screwed up, though. The edges of the brownie kind of climbed up the sides of the pan. Or, perhaps it's better to say the middle fell in. I don't know. I'm still a greenhorn when it comes to proper baking. This didn't seem to affect the taste, but it made a mess when I cut them up. Any idea what I might have done wrong?
Misty: Did you use a glass baking pan? If so, you'll need to drop the oven's temperature by 25F. Or did you use a dark baking pan, a metal one that's very darkly colored? Again, the temperature might need to be dropped--but probably not for these sturdy brownies.
I'm glad you like the taste, but I have a feeling the baking pan is the culprit here. Unless your baking powder was old and out of date. Still, it wouldn't stand to reason that the sides would rise while the middle fell.
That said, these are a bit fudgy, so my center was certainly denser than the edges.
M.
After purchasing unsatisfying brownies at several bakeries I thought "I need a brownie recipe that does NOT call for espresso powder" (I can always taste it in the finished product) - then I popped onto your website and my prayers were answered! I can't wait to try it.
I got the print friendly version to print but was wondering if in the future you could make a "recipe print friendly" version - as in a printer friendly version that is just the recipe minus the article - it could look like your recipe layout in the book. This way users wouldn't have to search through the print out to get the ingredient list, etc
BTW, I am in the process of reading your book Real Food Has Curves and I'm LOVING it!
I've been playing around with brownie recipes all month trying to find the perfect one to layer with goat cheese! I saw a Bobby Flay show where they made goat cheese brownies and it's been haunting my dreams ever siince. I'll give this one a whirll!
MMS: I think I'm going to leave the recipes as narratives for a while. Not to be too crass about it all, but since we write cookbooks and since some of these recipes arise from the cookbooks, I have to put them in alternate form to avoid certain copyright niceties. Yes, we own the copyrights on the ones in our books, but we cede certain rights to the publisher in exchange for publishing the books. That's a long, boring way around to say that I set up this blog as narratives to avoid just that problem. I hope you'll still try the brownies! And I'm so glad you're enjoying REAL FOOD HAS CURVES. I do think it's the most important book we've ever written.
RMW: Did you know Bruce and I are writing the first-ever, all-goat cookbook, due out in March: goat meat, goat milk, goat cheese. And we've got some killer goat cheese brownies in there--where you swap out the butter for goat cheese, in effect. Not layered, as you're suggesting here, but pretty darn fine. Still, I'd love to know how these turn out for you. Just watch that "baking in glass" problem, addressed in the comments above.
M.
Just wanted to follow up one last time. You were right on the money; I absolutely used a dark metal baking pan. I'll try reducing the oven temp next time. Thanks for the help! :)
Man oh Man!!! I love it!
My 3yr old kid devoured it. All I heard for the rest of the day was "can I have some more" over and over...
Great recipe.
You, my friend Lance, are fantastic. Love the site. And thanks for the kind words.
M.