Brownies
Dear Reader,
A bit of light reading.
For the past few weeks, I have been baking brownies. It’s been a journey. So far, I have made around six batches, most of which were bad.
This blog post isn’t going to be long, because I know absolutely nothing about food science, the perfect recipe, or what a perfect brownie even tastes like anymore. All I can say, is that there has been two emotions that came out of baking these batches: “Meh” and anger.
It all started with a simple Ghiradelli brownie mix. Naturally, I picked this one because Ghiradelli is the Mercedes of brownie mixes. It came out just like it should - fudge-y and delicious. While cutting up the rest of the brownies, a self-claimed-food-critic friend asked the question, “What’s the flour to egg ratio?” I quickly turned to say, “It’s box” and turned around to roll my eyes. She didn’t even finish her piece. That moment fueled me to make the best brownies she’s ever tasted.
Well, let’s just say that that’s probably not happening anytime soon.
One of my friends suggested that I try the brownie recipe from Serious Eats. I hate that video. The way the lady talks is insufferable (Maybe I watched it too many times).
My first batch was too cake-y. Like cardboard. I realized half way through the video that the lady was making brownies for a large group of people. I found a 8x8” pan recipe down in the comments. I’m pretty sure I over mixed it, too. I called a few of my friends to try it. It was gross.
My second batch was made the night before a trip to Yosemite, in hopes of being able to eat it on the drive. It was utterly inedible. This time, I tried melting the sugar with the butter and chocolate mix. To get experimental, I took out an egg from the original recipe. I thought maybe that was the ingredient that made the batch too cake-y. Turns out that egg was critical to the binding process. Who knew?
Friends told me that I need to add more fat. Okay, this is getting boring, but my third batch was better. It did need more fat. I melted down two dang sticks of butter. What had happened was, in the process of combining melted butter with chocolate, the butter was evaporating. I made sure this time to not over mix and over cook it. Timer was set to 25 minutes (10 minutes less than the suggested time).
Oh! Also, coffee and DUTCH COCOA POWDER is crucial to the flavor of chocolate. Most of the time, I used my Trader Joe’s cocoa powder. The taste isn’t nearly as delicious as the Dutch Cocoa.
ALL of this is to finally say that I will not be making brownies again for some time. I finally got it to an okay point and I’m sick of them now. I think I’ll try cheesecake. Or Ina Garten’s Famous Chocolate Cake. Now that sounds good. Here are some pics of my creation.
