Whether caky or fudgy, the best brownies rely on technique (2024)

View full sizeBeth Nakamura, The OregonianCrowd-pleasing Family Brownies

Brownies are basically just five ingredients: chocolate, butter, sugar, eggs and flour. So what accounts for the million brownie recipes out there, each one claiming to be the world's best? As those of us who feel strongly about caky versus fudgy know, ingredients are only half the story in the perfect-to-you brownie; it's what you do with them that counts.

Baker and culinary historian Nancy Baggett surmises that though there were no printed brownie recipes in America before the 20th century, New Englanders were already baking the treats before that. "Though it's often speculated that brownies were a happy accident resulting from somebody's cake falling, this isn't likely," she writes in "The All-American Cookie Book." Baggett points out that brownie batter has almost no liquid, so maybe brownies were "the fortunate result of someone forgetting the milk in a chocolate cake!"

Whatever their origins, the classic brownie formula has remained steadfast for over a century. A brownie recipe published in 1907 by Massachusetts chocolate and cocoa merchant Walter M. Lowney calls for two ounces of unsweetened chocolate, a stick of butter, a cup of sugar, two eggs and half a cup of flour. The brownie recipe accompanying this story is very nearly the same, only with more unsweetened chocolate.

So if the basic brownie recipe is so fundamental, why are there so many variations? One is technique. If you melt the butter with the chocolate and beat in the sugar and eggs, your brownies will be very different from ones made by first beating the eggs with the sugar until they triple in volume, then folding that into the melted chocolate and butter. Some recipes call for creaming the butter, not melting it. Baking temperatures, pan size -- all of these things greatly influence the end product, even if the batter ingredients are nearly identical.

Recipes included with this story: Crowd-pleasing Family Brownies.

The other reason is that even small changes in the very simple brownie formula result in significant differences. "The ratio of flour to other ingredients is a big deal for brownies," writes food scientist Shirley Corriher in "BakeWise: The Hows and Whys of Successful Baking With Over 200 Magnificent Recipes." "The difference between fudgy and caky brownies is the difference in the ratio of fat and chocolate to flour." So for fudgy brownies, use less flour; for caky, use more. Sifting half a teaspoon of baking powder into the flour or adding an extra egg also will result in more caky brownies.

With just a little fresh knowledge, you can learn to be a brownie decoder. Get the brownies you want with less work than ever by applying a few of the tips below to nearly any variant of the classic brownie recipe.

Melt and mix all in one pan:

Veteran cookbook author and baking instructor Nick Malgieri developed a speedy technique to melt the chocolate and butter over direct heat, then mix the batter in that very pan. No fussing with double boilers, and one less thing to wash.

Use a high-sided medium skillet or a low-sided medium saucepan to melt the butter. Keep an eye on it, and let it get hot enough to sputter. Right at that moment, add your finely chopped chocolate and remove from the heat. Stir, let it sit a minute or two while you prepare the baking pan, then stir again and voilà: smooth, melted chocolate. Using eggs straight from the refrigerator helps to bring the temperature of the batter down.

Chop chocolate with a serrated knife:

Half the work in making ultra-chocolaty brownies is just chunking up the darn chocolate. Make it easy by reaching for a serrated knife; the serrations bite into the smooth surface of the chocolate and prevent your knife from slipping. This allows you to produce finer shards of chocolate that melt quickly and more evenly. (If chopping chocolate is not your style, look for chocolate drops or discs.)

Beat your batter:

One thing that has changed since brownies first appeared on the American baking scene over a hundred years ago is our demand for excellent-quality chocolate, and lots of it. A new crop of contemporary brownie recipes touts much more chocolate than earlier ones.

When I started making brownies with lots and lots of chocolate, I loved their truffle-like intensity. But I also noticed my batter tended to separate and became greasy-looking, like a broken mayonnaise. Once baked, the brownies tasted yummy but had pitted tops, not the pretty, shiny ones everyone likes.

I asked cookbook author and chocolate maven Alice Medrich, who has probably baked more brownies than anyone else on the planet, why my batter misbehaved. She explained that we've all been taught to be gentle when adding the flour to brownie batter, because overbeating will make brownies dry and tough. In old-fashioned brownie recipes, which didn't call for very much chocolate, that's true. But newer recipes that contain huge amounts of chocolate and very little flour have a high ratio of fat (cocoa butter) to dry ingredients (flour). Not only is it nearly impossible to overmix these batters, it's very possible to under-mix them, which is what I was doing.

If your brownie recipe calls for more than four ounces of chocolate and contains less than half a cup of flour, go ahead and beat the heck out of the batter. You can even use an electric mixer, if you like. If the batter is slippery and greasy, keep on beating until it's thick and hom*ogenous. I promise your brownies will not be tough.

View full sizeBeth Nakamura, The OregonianSimple things are sometimes the most challenging. While brownies aren't complicated, varying the amounts of ingredients like chocolate or flour can make a big difference.

Line the pan:

Always line your pan with greased baking parchment or aluminum foil, leaving an overhang on either side to create handles. Once the pan is cool, lift the uncut brownie out of the pan with the handles, invert on a cutting board, peel off the parchment, and invert again so the brownie is shiny-side-up. Then cut. What might seem like an extra step will save you time -- no hacking away at the pan clumsily with a spatula -- and give you professional-looking results.

Size matters:

The difference between a 9-inch and an 8-inch pan is significant enough to really throw your hoped-for brownie texture out of whack, giving you crisp and flat brownies instead of unctuous and chewy brownies.

I like to bake brownies in an 8-inch square pan. This size is perfect for my small household and makes the rich and dense brownies I prefer. If you have more brownie lovers to feed, a 9-by-13-inch pan might be better for you. You can always experiment with a pan size other than what the recipe calls for, or halve or double a recipe, but understand that you are making an educated guess.

Give it a rest:

Refrigerate the unbaked batter in the pan up to three days. "It improves top gloss and crustiness, and it also blends the flavors so the brownies taste much richer," Medrich writes in "Bittersweet: Recipes and Tales From a Life in Chocolate." Resting the batter also offers the bonus of compartmentalizing the cleanup. (Just don't forget to transfer the batter to the baking pan before refrigerating it, since once it's cold, the cocoa butter in the chocolate will firm up and make it too stiff to work with.)

Nuts on top:

If you like nuts in brownies and want them to stay crunchy, don't mix them into the batter. Toast them first for the best flavor, then scatter them on top of the batter in the pan before baking the brownies. Or fold half of the toasted nuts into the batter, then sprinkle the remaining half on top of the pan.

Experiment with oven temperatures:

If you like gooey brownies, consider baking at a higher temperature, maybe 375 to 425 degrees. This cooks the edges faster while preserving the fudgy middle. For a doneness that's even all the way through the pan, use a baking temperature of 325 degrees. Either way, keep a close eye on baking times.

Shock your brownies like veggies:

Cooks often "shock" just-boiled vegetables by plunging them in ice water to stop the cooking, ensuring that they don't get overdone. Medrich advises you do something very similar with brownies, in order to achieve fudgy interiors: Prepare an ice bath in a pan bigger than the pan you baked the brownies in, then set the pan (NOT glass or Pyrex) of fresh-from-the-oven brownies into the ice bath. However, I prefer to just clear out a space in the freezer and place my hot brownies in there to cool and set up for an hour or so.

Chill out:

A cold pan of brownies is much easier to cut into tidy squares; the knife does not get gunked up, and the brownies don't shed as many crumbs. This is especially handy if you are "shocking" your pan of freshly baked brownies in the freezer, because it will already be fairly cold by the time you're ready to cut the bars.

Flip them over:

If the top side of your brownies are ugly (it happens), flip the uncut brownie over, peel off the parchment or foil, cut and serve bottom-up for a pretty, smooth presentation. I think that, when cut into small squares, brownies presented bottom-up way look more like truffley confections than baked goods.

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