BEST BROWNIES

The most delicious AND adaptable brownie recipe EVER

Hello again!

Welcome to month two of my recipe newsletter featuring beautiful photos by my sweet and generous friend Ben Turner, whose work you can find here.

I am excited to share my recipe for the best brownies. They have a gooey interior, crackly top, crunchy corners, and just the right amount of salt. Plus the recipe is super versatile and adaptable if you want to go gluten free, play around with different flours, or alternative sugars and fats.

This recipe has roots in another recipe that I developed alongside Marta Teegen when I was the Chef at Cookbook Market. We started with Alice Medrich’s Cocoa Brownie as a foundation and adapted it to our taste - adjusting quantities of ingredients, adding melted chocolate and replacing the all-purpose flour with nutty rye flour. I’ve played around with the recipe a ton over the years and have found that it is endlessly adaptable. Replace the rye flour with other whole grain flours, all-purpose flour, gluten free flour, or cassava flour. Replace the granulated sugar with coconut sugar or maple sugar. Replace the butter with ghee, coconut oil, or vegan butter like Miyoko’s.

As you will soon learn about me, I am extremely loyal to certain brands because they can make a huge difference in the final outcome of a recipe. For these brownies, I use Valhrona or Droste cocoa powder and Ghirardelli bittersweet chocolate chips. I’ve experimented with fancier chocolate and I find that Ghirardelli is the perfect middle ground - not too fancy and not too trashy, it‘s the taste of comfort and familiarity.

I love Kerrygold butter, and it’s what I usually have on hand, but there’s no need to be brand specific with the butter in this recipe as chocolate is the dominant flavor here, so feel free to use any unsalted butter that you like.

A note on instant read thermometers - most people don’t bake with a thermometer, but I’ve made these brownies so many times that I’ve figured out at exactly what temperature they are done. It’s super fool-proof and allows you to cook them perfectly in any oven. You don’t have to use an instant read thermometer to check if your brownies are done, but if you have one you might as well try it out. An instant read thermometer also takes all the guesswork out of cooking meat and fish perfectly, but more on that another time!

Finally, and most importantly, I want to talk about why measuring ingredients by weight is superior to measuring ingredients by volume (with measuring cups). If you want to skip the whole next paragraph, just trust me and buy an inexpensive kitchen scale and never measure for baking by volume ever again. I really like this Oxo scale, but there are plenty of other options that are more and less expensive. Ok so here is why:

Measuring by volume is imprecise. There are so many ways to mess it up. For example, If you dunk your measuring cup into a bag of flour you will end up with a different quantity of flour than if you scoop the flour from the bag into the cup and then level it. This recipe also calls for chocolate chips, which are basically impossible to measure by volume. Chips can vary in size and there is so much room for error. Measuring cocoa powder into a measuring cup is a messy nightmare. Wouldn’t you rather just spoon everything straight into one bowl? Teaspoons and tablespoon measurements are more user-friendly and can come in handy for tiny measurements like 1/8 teaspoon, but they’re still annoying to clean so I avoid using them when possible.

Measuring by weight will make you a better baker, period. Everything goes straight in the bowl on top of the scale, it’s exactly the same every time, and there’s less clean up because you’re not using a bunch of tiny little cups.

Did I convince you to buy a scale??? Email me if you need more convincing, seriously.

I have debated all week about whether or not to include measurements by volume in this recipe. I don’t want to be cruel to those of you who don’t have a scale yet, so I’ve decided to include the recipe in volume measurements at the end of this newsletter,¹ but if you take away one piece of information from this, please invest in a kitchen scale!!!

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BEST BROWNIE makes one 8x8 tray, or about 16 brownies

• 210g (equivalent to 2 sticks minus 1 tablespoon to grease the pan) unsalted butter (or vegan butter, ghee, coconut oil, etc.)

• 375g granulated sugar (or coconut sugar, maple sugar, or a mix of granulated and brown sugar)

• 7g kosher salt (ok this might seem like a lot but please trust me)

• 60g Valrhona or Droste cocoa powder

• 60g + 100g Ghirardelli bittersweet 60% chocolate chips (if you are going refined sugar free I like to use Hu Dark Chocolate Gems)

• ¾  teaspoon vanilla extract (Yes I used a teaspoon here, but this is kind of too little to measure on a regular scale. Or, you can just do a lil’ splash from the bottle and forget the measuring spoons altogether, which is absolutely what I do)

• 3 large eggs, room temperature ideal but fine if cold from the fridge 

• 90g rye flour (or spelt flour, all-purpose flour, gluten free flour, cassava flour, etc.) (I tried this with almond flour and I think next time I would increase the quantity to 110g, or mix it with gf flour or cassava flour)

• Optional - 100g lightly toasted nuts. I would go for pecans, personally.

Preheat your oven to 350 F.

Prepare your pan: butter or oil an 8x8 metal baking dish, then lay down a piece of parchment that is cut to the same width as the dish, and then butter/oil the parchment. Set aside. **Please use a metal pan, NOT ceramic or glass. Glass and ceramic conduct heat differently and you will have to bake your brownie longer, leading to an overcooked exterior. BAD brownies.

Combine the butter, sugar, cocoa powder, 60g chocolate chips (the remaining chips will get folded in later), and salt in a medium heatproof bowl and set over a slightly larger pot of simmering water. This is called a double boiler. Chocolate is sensitive to heat, and the double boiler ensures a nice even, gentle heat. You want the chocolate and the butter to be completely melted. Once melted, remove the bowl from the double boiler. This mixture will look gritty and wrong, but do not fear!

Now that you have the bowl off of the heat, stir in the vanilla extract. Add the eggs one at a time, stirring vigorously after each egg (a whisk is useful here). The eggs are cold and raw and the mixture is hot, so be sure to fully incorporate the eggs quickly so they don’t scramble in the batter. The mixture will still look gritty and wrong, but by the time you add the final egg it should start to look like smooth brownie batter.

Stir in the flour and remaining 100g chocolate chips, add nuts if using. Mix thoroughly - you don’t want any streaks of unincorporated flour. Unlike with a delicate cake recipe where you want to stir minimally to inhibit gluten formation aka toughness, you can kind of go crazy on these brownies because we want them dense and chewy anyways.

Pour the batter into your prepared baking pan and bake in a 350 oven for 40-45 minutes, or until the center reaches 205 F on an instant read thermometer. If not using a thermometer, use a wooden skewer to check for doneness - you want some brownie goo sticking to the skewer, but not too much raw batter.

Allow brownies to cool in their pan for at least an hour before cutting. I personally prefer a room temperature brownie to a hot brownie - the chocolate tastes more like chocolate and the brownies get more chewy - but if you’re desperate you can cut into them after about 20 minutes.

Store leftovers in a tightly sealed tupperware container. These brownies are best eaten on day one, two, or three, but are quite good for up to 5 days after baking.

** I baked these brownies exactly one week ago and ate the last piece yesterday. It was kind of dry but honestly tasted shockingly like those store-bought individual brownie bites. Extremely satisfying.

THE END

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THANK YOU FOR READING!!!!

1. BEST BROWNIE BY VOLUME

15 tablespoons (equivalent to 2 sticks minus 1 tablespoon to grease the pan) unsalted butter (or vegan butter, ghee, coconut oil, etc.)

1 cup + ¾ cup + 2 tablespoons granulated sugar (or coconut sugar, maple sugar, or a mix of granulated and brown sugar)

2 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt (ok this might seem like a lot but please trust me)

1/2 cup Valrhona or Droste cocoa powder

½ cup + ¾ cup Ghirardelli bittersweet 60% chocolate chips (if you are going refined sugar free I like to use Hu Dark Chocolate Gems)

¾  teaspoon vanilla extract (or you can just do a lil’ splash from the bottle and forget the measuring spoons)

3 large eggs, room temperature ideal but fine if from the fridge 

3/4 cup rye flour (or spelt flour, all-purpose flour, gluten free flour, or cassava flour)

Optional - 3/4 cup lightly toasted nuts