When are we ever going to stop saying: “It’s as American as apple pie!” Good grief, we wouldn’t even be growing apples here if the Europeans hadn’t brought them over to their new world. Apple pie is a foreign pie made with foreign fruit. Tastes great. Totally un-American.
Brownies, on the other hand, can boast a true American pedigree. The first chocolate brownie recipe – born in Boston, Massachusetts, USA – is credited to Fannie Merritt Farmer at the dawn of the 20th century. And while most modern recipes for brownies bear only passing resemblance to her original recipe, I would argue that her spirit lives on in every batch of brownies ever baked.
In the interest of full disclosure, I never knew Fannie Farmer. I have neither her direct word nor autobiographical evidence to support my argument. What I’m going on is pure brownie lore. Yes, conventional brownie mythology suggests that she developed her brownie recipe by drastically reducing the amount of flour in a recipe for chocolate cookies. As you will see below, that concept underlies one of the fundamental things I believe we should be talking about whenever we discuss brownies.
Brownies don’t have a complicated list of ingredients: chocolate, butter, flour, eggs, sugar, and some vanilla. The problem with brownies is not the ingredients, it’s the recipes. Thousands and thousands of recipes – surely they all can’t be “The Only Brownie Recipe You’ll Ever Need!” In fact, I think most of the recipes I’ve seen would produce dreadful brownies. The problem, I believe, is not that brownies are hard to make but that they are hard to understand and analyze.
So, in this posting, I want to establish some guidelines to help you understand and analyze brownies. I will also offer some numerical guidelines to confront the ambiguities of so many words you find in recipes for brownies: cakey, fudgy, chewy, chocolate-y, rich, light, etc. – these words are far from universal in their meaning so I propose that we try to express some of the qualities of brownies using ratios of component ingredients. Some of my analysis will get a little technical, but if you want to take control of your brownies, you’ll have to take some time to think about what’s going on in your recipe – you’ll need to try and understand how changes in individual ingredients impact the overall outcomes of your brownies.
I should also mention up-front that the analyses I propose here are my own – what follows has NO longstanding culinary history to support it – whatever merit my arguments might have begins here. This is a strongly worded opinion piece – but I ask that you take some time to think about what I have to say. I have spent a LOT of time thinking about it.
As you read this, just remember that if you already have a recipe for brownies that is dependable and that gives you brownies you love and respect, then all of this musing and analyzing might be of little worth to you. I offer the information in this post to help you in situations where, instead, you have a recipe that you would like to understand and adapt to move your brownies in a direction that suits your individual desires. Towards that end, I will offer three sample recipes to illustrate a starting point – recipes that I have found to be reliable (if not desirable in the case of the unsweetened cocoa powder brownies below – I just don’t like cocoa powder brownies too much).
If you really want to understand what’s going on in your recipes, you have to dig into your ingredients. For brownies, you have to understand that your chocolate contributes flavor (cocoa solids), fat (cocoa butter), and possibly sugar to the recipe – each of these components influences different characteristics of your finished brownies. The flavor from the chocolate solids has to be suitably balanced with sugar – and that sugar can come from the white sugar in the recipe OR from sugar within the chocolate you are using. The fat from cocoa butter has a pronounced effect on the texture of the brownies – more cocoa butter means a firmer, chewier, denser, richer brownie. And how you support your cocoa butter, cocoa solids, and butter with flour determines the structure of your brownies. By understanding and controlling the effects of these relationships, you can modify any workable brownie recipe and tailor it precisely to your own liking. Having a brownie recipe that works for you shouldn’t be a matter of trial-and-error – it should be a matter of conscious manipulation of the ratios of ingredients in your recipe.
Again, I think that Fannie Merritt Farmer had the right fundamental idea – changing the characteristics of a chocolate cookie by controlling the amount of flour in the recipe. I’ll address a few other issues that relate to variations on her theme, but I defer to her theme as my starting point.
One final note before I get started – I’ll be using weights for most of my measurements, not volumes. As you will see, the relative weights of the heavier ingredients drive all of my analysis.
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As I mentioned above, brownies are basically just chocolate, butter, flour, eggs, sugar, and some vanilla. Many are baked with nuts on top.
Fannie Farmer’s original recipe called for:
Sugar – 7 oz. (remember that I’m converting to weight from her volumetric measures)
Butter – 2 oz.
Egg – 1 whole
Unsweetened Chocolate – 2 oz. melted
Vanilla Extract – 3/4 tsp.
Flour – 2 1/2 oz.
—The ingredients were mixed in the order presented (butter and sugar were creamed), poured into a greased and lined pan, topped with walnuts, and baked at 325° F.
If you were to make this recipe, I think you would find it to have a very different texture and flavor from what our modern sensibilities expect a brownie to be. They would be a little flat and not too chocolaty. To set the tone for the analysis that will follow, let me observe three things about her recipe: (1) all the sweetness comes from sugar (the chocolate is unsweetened), (2) the fat in the recipe comes from the butter AND from the cocoa butter in the unsweetened chocolate, & (3) with only 1 egg and such a small amount of flour, the structure of her brownies would have been dense and heavy.
Historically, only a decade after Farmer’s confectionery-precedent-setting publication, recipes had already appeared with alterations that brought the brownie pretty much in-line with what we think of as a brownie today: basically more chocolate (flavor) and more egg (structure).
But now we have gone from having a handful of adaptations to having thousands. How can we make sense of the glut of options available? Hopefully by looking at specific ingredient relationships within different recipes, we can understand and control our outcomes. Remember that I cannot define what makes a great brownie – only YOU can do that. What I CAN do is explain the various relationships that exist in a brownie recipe in a way that allows you to adapt and craft a brownie recipe to fit your model of perfection.
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Let me start out with three technical and three general guidelines for what happens in brownie recipes. I’ll follow these guidelines by analyzing three recipes. Everything that follows will draw heavily from the information in my previous post about the components of different types of chocolate.
Guideline 1 – Modern recipes for brownies fall into three categories that are determined by the type of chocolate used in the recipe: (1) brownies made from unsweetened chocolate (where it all started), (2) brownies made from unsweetened cocoa powder, & (3) brownies made from two or more different kinds of chocolate (typically unsweetened chocolate and bittersweet/semi-sweet chocolate – possibly with some unsweetened cocoa powder too). The importance of this distinction cannot be overstated. The fundamental difference between these three different choices for chocolate flavor comes from the amount of fat in the recipe that comes from cocoa butter. Unsweetened cocoa powder contains very little cocoa butter (about 10% by weight). Unsweetened chocolate is half cocoa butter (about 50% by weight). And as you will see in the examples below, brownies made with multiple types of chocolate typically have even more cocoa butter. At room temperature, cocoa butter has a firmer texture than butter and contributes to a denser texture and heartier consistency in baked brownies. The percentage of fat in brownies attributable to cocoa butter makes a huge difference in the texture of the brownies. Brownies that have more fat from cocoa butter will have a denser and chewier texture and will hold together better.
Guideline 2 – The Fanny Farmer Fudge Factor – Brownies are often described as being either “fudgy” or “cakey” – “fudgy” brownies are heavy with very little structure (like fudge) and “cakey” brownies are light and airy (like cake). The amount of flour in the recipe controls this spectrum of structure. Less flour – more “fudgy” – more flour – more “cakey” – it’s about as simple as that. To compare the potential results between two recipes, examine the ratio of the total weight of butter and cocoa (butter and solids) to the weight of the flour – ratios closer to 100% are more “cakey” and ratios closer to 400% are more “fudgy.” For my own particular taste, ratios that are in the neighborhood of 200% represent a “best of both worlds” brownie. In the spectrum of ALL brownie recipes, though, it is not uncommon to see ratios that are significantly higher than 400% (ultra-mega-turbo-fudgy brownies – that’s my term…not technically a valid culinary description).
Guideline 3 – Unsweetened chocolate needs sugar to make it palatable – some chocolates (like bittersweet and semi-sweet) come with sugar built-in – others (the unsweetened crowd) come with no sugar. Brownies with good chocolate flavor that is neither too bitter nor too sweet have a ratio (by weight) of cocoa solids (flavor) to sugar that is between 20% and 22%. Higher ratios mean more chocolate flavor and less sweetness – lower ratios mean less chocolate flavor and more sweetness. Let me be clear here that having more chocolate flavor doesn’t mean being more chocolate-y – it means having a higher ratio of unsweetened cocoa solids to sugar – having a lot of chocolate flavor, in this case, would mean having a bitter and unpalatable brownie.
So, to summarize: (1) the texture or chewiness or density or richness of a brownie is largely determined by the percentage of cocoa butter in the fat of the recipe, (2) the structure of brownies is governed by the amount of fat and cocoa (butter and solids) in the recipe relative to the amount of flour added – “fudgy” brownies have less flour for structure so the ratio of butter and cocoa butter and cocoa solids to flour is high – “cakey” brownies have more flour for structure so the ratio of butter and cocoa butter and cocoa solids to flour is low, & (3) there IS such a thing as having too much or not enough chocolate flavor (meaning cocoa solids) in your brownies – a good guideline is to shoot for a ratio of cocoa solids to sugar that is between 20% and 22%.
Guideline 4 – Use white sugar. The way to get proper chocolate flavor is by combining cocoa solids (flavor) with white sugar. Light brown sugar and dark brown sugar impart a butterscotch-y flavor to baked goods – it is brown sugar that is responsible for that butterscotch-y taste in the cookie part of chocolate chip cookies – for my own taste sensibilities, butterscotch-y flavor doesn’t pair well with the chocolate flavor.
Note – I’ll be looking at the often desirable butterscotch-y flavor specifically in a later posting on blondies.
Guideline 5 – WARNING – this will probably be considered a very controversial guideline. Include some baking powder and salt in your recipe. Old recipes for brownies get a little bit of lift from creaming the sugar into softened butter (that’s the same way pound cakes get their lift). Modern recipes, almost universally, specify that you should instead melt the butter with the chocolate – this simplifies the recipe at the cost of a little bit of lift in the oven – some baking power in the mix serves to compensate for this modern age simplification. Salt brightens and amplifies the taste of chocolate in the brownies. Many brownie recipes you will see omit both of these ingredients.
Guideline 6 – Use the pan size specified in the recipe. Most recipes for brownies specify either an 8″ x 8″ pan or a 9″ x 13″ pan. A little bit of multiplication explains the relationship between these two pans: 8″ x 8″ = 64 in.² – 9″ x 13″ = 117 in.² – basically, a 9″ x 13″ pan has a little less than twice the area of an 8″ x 8″ pan. So if you want to double the recipe given for an 8″ x 8″ pan, use a 9″ x 13″ pan (and you might have to extend baking time a little bit) – if you want to halve the recipe given for a 9″ x 13″ pan, use an 8″ x 8″ pan (and you might have to shorten the baking time a little bit).
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Mixing and Baking Technique
I separate my ingredients into three bowls (I use bowls because I weigh my ingredients): (1) chocolate and butter are melted using a double boiler and allowed to cool for 10-15 minutes, (2) sugar, eggs, vanilla, and salt are whisked briskly to combine, & (3) flour and baking powder are whisked briskly to combine. Once everything is weighed and melted and whisked, I whisk the sugar/egg mixture into the chocolate/butter mixture – then I use a rubber spatula to gently fold the flour mixture into the wet ingredients. When folding the flour into the other ingredients, it is important to mix gently, but mix thoroughly until all streaks and traces of flour are gone and the brownie batter is uniform in color and texture.
While it is possible to successfully melt the butter and chocolate in a microwave, it is VERY easy to overheat your mixture which will cause the chocolate to turn into a grainy lumpy mess. I prefer the control afforded by using a double boiler to melt my chocolate and butter – just be sure to gently whisk your mixture while it is melting and remove the chocolate bowl from its simmering water nest as soon as the ingredients are melted to prevent overheating.
My separation of the resources common to all brownie recipes.
Also, to simplify the process of removing the brownies from their baking pan, I prepare a foil sling inside the pan. Simply fold some foil to fit within the confines of your pan and press it to fit tightly into the bottom edges of your pan – do this to cover both directions – the edges of the foil should fit over the sides of your baking pan, but not be so long that they become cumbersome and interfere with the transition of the pan from counter to over and from oven to cooling rack. Spray the pan generously with baking release spray or grease generously with butter or shortening. Since brownies are built on a foundation of butter, I tend to use butter to grease my sling-fitted pans.
Heavily buttered foil sling in an 8″ x 8″ pan.
Testing for doneness in brownies has always been fraught with problems for me. I agree with most experts that say if you use a toothpick test to check your brownies and the toothpick comes out completely clean, the brownies are almost surely overbaked. Overbaked brownies are pretty dreadful. Basically, erring on the side of underbaking is probably better than risking overbaking. Descriptions abound as to how to read the qualities of a toothpick you have used to jab your fragrant creations – those descriptions have failed me time-and-time-again. I hate to pull out such an unscientific gesture here, but I pretty much universally depend on times for baking rather than devining signs using toothpicks (and I should also note that the baking times I have settled-on tend to be on the long side, compared to the guidelines typically presented in the countless recipes I have consulted over the years).
Finally, some useful but hateful advice – walk away from the baked brownies and let them cool in peace. Brownies fresh out of the oven give off an intoxicating aroma, but let that serve as a reminder that they will be worth the wait. Allow them to cool for at least two hours before you use the sling to lift them out of their pan and begin slicing them. They need this cooling time for their texture to fully form.
Two competing brownie recipes – cooled and removed from their baking pans – ready for consumption.
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Three Recipes With Commentary and Analysis
Unsweetened Chocolate Brownies – 8″ x 8″ pan – lower middle oven rack.
Unsweetened Chocolate – 3 oz.
Unsalted Butter – 4 oz. (1 stick)
—–Melted in a double boiler and allowed to cool.
Sugar – 7 oz.
Eggs – 2 whole
Vanilla Extract – 1 tsp.
Salt – 1/2 tsp.
—–Whisked.
AP Flour – 3 3/8 oz.
Baking Powder – 1/2 tsp.
—–Whisked.
Baked at 350° F for 28 minutes.
Note – Unsweetened chocolate is about 50% cocoa butter (fat) and 50% cocoa solids (flavor) – that gives us 1.5 oz. each of cocoa butter and cocoa solids.
Analysis:
% Fat from Cocoa Butter = 1.5 oz. cocoa butter / (1.5 oz. cocoa butter + 4 oz. butter) = 27%
Fudge Factor = Cocoa and Butter as a Percentage of Flour = (4 oz. butter + 1.5 oz. cocoa butter + 1.5 oz. cocoa solids) / 3 3/8 oz. flour = about 207%
Ratio of Cocoa Solids to Sugar = 1.5 oz cocoa solids / 7 oz. sugar = about 21%
Unsweetened Chocolate Recipe – crowned generously with pecans prior to baking.
Notes on Nuts – Any time I choose to make brownies with nuts, I always spread the nuts on TOP of the brownie batter before I bake them – I never mix the nuts into the batter. My choice here is a preference more than a guideline – the nuts on top tend to become crisper and more fragrant as some of the moisture in the nuts is driven-off during baking (which I find to be desirable) – nuts that are mixed into the brownie batter will be softer since they will steam as moisture in the batter is driven-out during baking. ON the brownies vs. IN the brownies – it’s just a matter of taste.
Unsweetened Cocoa Powder Brownies – 8″ x 8″ pan – lower middle oven rack.
Unsweetened Cocoa Powder – 2 1/8 oz.
Unsalted Butter – 5 oz. (10 Tbsp.)
—–Melted in a double boiler and allowed to cool.
Sugar – 9 oz.
Eggs – 2 whole
Vanilla Extract – 1 tsp.
Salt – 1/2 tsp.
—–Whisked.
AP Flour – 3 3/8 oz.
Baking Powder – 1/2 tsp.
—–Whisked.
Baked at 350° F for 28 minutes.
Note – Unsweetened cocoa powder is about 10% cocoa butter (fat) and 90% cocoa solids (flavor) – that gives us roughly .2 oz. of cocoa butter and 1.9 oz. of cocoa solids.
Analysis:
% Fat from Cocoa Butter = .2 oz. cocoa butter / (.2 oz. cocoa butter + 5 oz. butter) = 3.8%
Fudge Factor = Cocoa and Butter as a Percentage of Flour = (5 oz. butter + .2 oz. cocoa butter + 1.9 oz. cocoa solids) / 3 3/8 oz. flour = about 215%
Ratio of Cocoa Solids to Sugar = 1.9 oz cocoa solids / 9 oz. sugar = about 21%
Comparison to the Unsweetened Chocolate Brownies – Only the chocolate, butter, and sugar have been altered here – all other ingredients have remained the same. It was necessary to use more butter in this recipe to compensate for the relatively low cocoa butter content in the unsweetened cocoa powder. Notice that the Fudge Factor here and the Ratio of Cocoa Solids to Sugar remain about the same as they were in the unsweetened chocolate brownies. But replacing the cocoa butter fat with butter fat gives these brownies a noticeably different texture – they tend to have less of a satisfying density – they break very easily. In my experience they are usually darker in color.
Unsweetened Cocoa Brownies – I fortified these with a huge fistful of raisins to improve the texture and density of this batch of brownies.
From the Department of Unsolicited Opinions – I am not a big fan of brownies made from Unsweetened Cocoa Powder – cocoa butter is an important component in recipes that suit my taste. Now, having said that, I should also mention that the only cocoa powder that I have easy access to here is Hershey’s Unsweetened Cocoa Powder (100% Cacao), which is considered a low-fat cocoa powder – it is the only cocoa powder universally available in local grocery stores. There are unsweetened cocoa powders out there that have a higher fat content (like 20%-25% cocoa butter) – I have never made brownies from any of these cocoas, but I imagine they would be significantly better (plus, most of these higher fat cocoas are made by gourmet chocolate companies). The next time I am in a store that stocks gourmet cocoa powders, I promise that I’ll get a canister of the “good stuff” and see how brownies made with a higher fat cocoa pan-out (yeah…that was an intentional pun).
Triple Chocolate Brownies – 8″ x 8″ pan – lower middle oven rack.
Unsweetened Chocolate – 2 oz.
Bittersweet Chocolate Chips – 5 oz.
Unsweetened Cocoa Powder – 1/2 oz. (about 3 Tbsp.)
Unsalted Butter – 4 oz. (1 stick)
—–Melted in a double boiler and allowed to cool.
Sugar – 8 3/4 oz.
Eggs – 3 whole
Vanilla Extract – 1 1/2 tsp.
Salt – 3/4 tsp.
—–Whisked.
AP Flour – 5 oz.
Baking Powder – 3/4 tsp.
—–Whisked.
Baked at 350° F for 40 minutes.
Comments – This makes a thicker brownie and uses three different sources of chocolate. Compared to the unsweetened chocolate recipe, this recipe has 50% more eggs, vanilla, salt, flour, and baking powder. Using the different types of chocolate gives these brownies a superb complex chocolate flavor – this is my own favorite recipe for brownies. For a more pronounced chocolate taste, include 1-2 Tbsp. of instant espresso powder in the double boiler bowl with your chocolate and butter. Another fantastic flavor option is to add the zest of 1-2 small oranges to the egg and sugar bowl.
Notes – Unsweetened chocolate is about 50% cocoa butter (fat) and 50% cocoa solids (flavor) – that gives us 1 oz. each of cocoa butter and cocoa solids. Bittersweet chocolate chips are about 50% sugar, 30% cocoa butter, and 20% cocoa solids – that gives us 2.5 oz. sugar, 1.5 oz. cocoa butter, and 1 oz. cocoa solids. Finally the unsweetened cocoa powder is about 10% cocoa butter and 90% cocoa solids – that gives us roughly .05 oz. of cocoa butter and .45 oz. of cocoa solids. We need to consider the components from all three chocolates in our analysis below. Adding-up the components from all three chocolates gives us: total cocoa butter = 1 oz. + 1.5 oz. + .05 oz. = 2.55 oz., total cocoa solids = 1 oz. + 1 oz. + .45 oz. = 2.45 oz., and total sugar from chocolate = 2.5 oz.
Analysis:
% Fat from Cocoa Butter = 2.55 oz. total cocoa butter / (2.55 oz. total cocoa butter + 4 oz. butter) = 38.9%
Fudge Factor = Cocoa and Butter as a Percentage of Flour = (4 oz. butter + 2.55 oz. total cocoa butter + 2.45 oz. total cocoa solids) / 5 oz. flour = 180%
Ratio of Cocoa Solids to Sugar = 2.45 oz. total cocoa solids / (8.75 oz. + 2.5 oz. sugar) = 21.7%
Comparison to Unsweetened Chocolate and Unsweetened Cocoa Brownies – Even though there are three sources of chocolate in these brownies, the Ratio of Cocoa Solids to Sugar remains nearly identical to that same ratio in the previous recipes. The most notable difference in these brownies comes from the amount of cocoa butter fat in the recipe. Nearly 40% of the fat here comes from the cocoa butter in the unsweetened chocolate and the bittersweet chocolate chips. That increase in the cocoa butter generates a firmness and chewiness to these brownies that I like very much. These brownies also score lower on the Fudge Factor – this means that they will be slightly more “cakey” than the other recipes, but not by much. Remember that if you want to push these brownies further in the “fudgy” direction, you need only reduce the amount of flour in the recipe by a little bit (and for a taller, airier, and “cakier” brownie, you would correspondingly increase the amount of flour in the recipe by a little bit).
Triple Chocolate Brownie – my idea of perfection and possibly a good starting point from which you can derive your perfect brownie recipe.
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Concluding Comments – In many of my previous posts I have obsessed over Baker’s Percentages – the ratios of component ingredient weights relative to the weight of the flour in a recipe. For brownies, I think this approach falls apart because, for once, playing fast-and-loose with the amount of flour in the recipe is a means to changing a fundamental quality of the brownies (which I have called the Fannie Farmer Fudge Factor). In brownie bakery, I believe other ratios give more useful information and choose to take a unique approach: start with known results from specified ingredient amounts and adapt by knowing how changes in component ingredients will affect your outcomes.
And a Reminder – I ask you to remember that I am writing these posts to develop and encourage a community of kitchen thought – my emphasis will always be on how I think about things in the kitchen – the bulk of my words will focus on process rather than on prescriptive recipes. Please help me out by giving me feedback and by letting me know how YOU think about things when you cook.
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