The Perfect Brownie

What makes a good brownie? Do you like a brownie that's more cake-like or do you prefer the chewier fudgy kind? There are so many different types of brownies it's hard to say which exactly is the perfect brownie, though I'm here to find out!

Brownies seem to be the perfect dessert in every way except maybe on the waist line. Brownies make for a rich chocolatey finish to a great meal. And for this reason alone I am intent on mastering the brownie. But you might be thinking, where do I start?

The first thing I did was search through dozens of brownie recipes both online and in my cookbooks. And I learned a few important techniques in brownie perfection:

1. Use room temperature ingredients. Apparently the temperature of your butter and eggs reflects on the texture of your brownie.
2. Let your chocolate mixture cool before mixing into the batter. If you're using real chocolate, rather than cocoa powder, let the chocolate and butter mixture cool before combining it with the remaining ingredients. This small but important step yields a consistent result.
3. Check the amount of flour used in your brownie recipe. Less flour produces a chewier brownie, more flour yields a cakier brownie.
4. Only use the type of chocolate the recipe calls for. Some recipes call for cocoa powder, while others call for actual chocolate. While you can often swap bittersweet chocolate for dark as well as other variations, it is not recommended to use cocoa powder if the recipe calls for chocolate.

In the last week I tried out two distinctly different recipes, one using dutch process cocoa powder and the other using a mix of dark and bittersweet chocolate. Which do you think came out better? Well, the truth is that it's all in the eye of the beholder. While the cocoa powder brownies were incredibly rich, being that dutch process cocoa is the best chocolate you can use, the brownies made of melted chocolate were chewier giving them a completely different taste. I happened to prefer the dutch process brownies because of their rich complex flavor, or maybe because they were concepted by the famous Nick Malgeri. But feel free to try out the recipes and decide for yourself.

Nick's Supernatural Brownies (Melted Chocolate)

Dutch Process Cocoa Powder Recipe, To be posted...

Just remember, a real brownie is made with nuts! Though I usually bake half of the batter without nuts to satisfy everyone's cravings, even if I disagree with them.