Occasionally Coherent

Browniefest part 8: Brooke Dojny’s daughter Maury’s “Best Brownies”

Posted on 2015-06-21 by Garrett Wollman

Brooke Dojny’s The New England Cookbook (Harvard Common Press, 1999) is one of those reference works (like the more famous Joy of Cooking) that I consult fairly frequently when I’m thinking about something I want to cook, but rarely actually choose to make anything from. That’s not because the recipes are bad, but more because of the very traditional, reference nature of this cookbook — the recipes are “exactly what it says on the tin”, the traditional recipes that those of us who grew up in New England remember from our childhood. There are illustrations, but no photos, and there is good historical material about the origins of each recipe, but rarely anything to get excited about. Her brownie recipe — or rather, her daughter’s brownie recipe (“Maury’s Best Brownies”, p. 561) is about as traditional as you can get, and I almost wrote it off completely, but then I noticed one unusual ingredient.

“Maury’s Best Brownies” are traditional in nearly every respect, including the fairly small quantity (2 oz) of unsweetened chocolate as the major flavoring. The recipe departs from the usual in only one ingredient: an eighth of a teaspoon of black pepper (freshly ground, of course). The preparation is by standard technique #2 (as set out in part 2 of this series), with no leavening, and the brownies are baked in an 8×8 pan. I used the optional walnuts, which after toasting and chopping weighed in at 55 g.

After baking, they don’t look like anything special, just your usual brownies. For Browniefest I followed the serving suggestion of 16 2×2 squares, but as you’ll see from the nutrition section below, they could easily support portioning into 9 squares instead.

Evaluation results

I was really surprised by the response to these brownies. I had thought that — despite the unusual spice — they were pretty boring, ho-hum brownies, but they came in tied for seventh place with a 3.7 “overall impression” score (n=8), received excellent marks for “moistness/mouth feel”, and despite the limited quantity of chocolate, scored well above average on “chocolate flavor” as well. One taster commented, “Maury’s Best Rocks”, and chose this recipe as their favorite.

Nutrition

These brownies qualify as “A Low Sodium Food” under FDA regulations.

Nutrition Facts
Serving size: one 2″x2″ square (35g)
Servings per recipe: 16
Amount per serving
Calories 164	Calories from fat 90
% Daily Value
Total Fat 10g	15%
Saturated Fat 5g	25%
Trans Fat 0g
Cholesterol 37mg	12%
Sodium 48mg	2%
Potassium 15mg	0%
Total Carbohydrate 17g	6%
Dietary fiber <1g	1%
Sugars 12g
Proteins 2g	5%
Vitamin A	5%
Vitamin C	0%
Calcium	1%
Iron	4%

Posted in Food | Tagged Brooke Dojny, browniefest, brownies, chocolate, recipe

Browniefest part 7: An update on King Arthur Flour’s “Double Fudge Brownies”

Posted on 2015-06-20 by Garrett Wollman

I’ve already written two posts about “Double Fudge Brownies”, a whole-wheat recipe from King Arthur Flour’s Whole Wheat Baking, including a complete walk-through, so I don’t really have much to add here. However, I did redo the nutritional analysis to reflect how I made and served this recipe for Browniefest. As before, I used traditional whole wheat flour and India Tree dark muscovado sugar.

Evaluation results

These brownies are made with chocolate chips — this time, I used Guittard Akoma 55% semisweet chips — and, like the Cook’s Illustrated recipe with hand-chopped semisweet chocolate chunks, it was marked down by many tasters on texture grounds that I think were due mostly if not entirely to the brownies having been stored in the freezer prior to service, which caused the chocolate chips to re-harden after having partially melted during the baking process. This is still one of my favorite recipes, despite getting an overall score of 3.0 (n=7) and finishing out of the top 10. The same tasters actually gave this recipe better than average scores on the more specific elements (“chocolate flavor”, “chewiness”, and “moistness/mouth feel”), which suggests that there’s some category I failed to capture in my data collection.

Nutrition

Recalculated to reflect the portion sizes and specific ingredients used for this batch. “A Low Sodium Food” according to FDA regulations.

Nutrition Facts
Serving size: one 2″x2¼” square (56g)
Servings per recipe: 24
Amount per serving
Calories 251	Calories from fat 117
% Daily Value
Total Fat 13g	20%
Saturated Fat 8g	38%
Trans Fat 0g
Cholesterol 55mg	18%
Sodium 129mg	5%
Potassium 11mg	0%
Total Carbohydrate 31g	10%
Dietary fiber 3g	10%
Sugars 23g
Proteins 4g	7%
Vitamin A	6%
Vitamin C	0%
Calcium	2%
Iron	18%

Posted in Food | Tagged browniefest, brownies, chocolate, King Arthur Flour, recipe, whole wheat

Browniefest part 6: Ovenly’s “Salty Super Dark Chocolate Brownies” and “Cinnamon & Ancho Chile Brownies”

Posted on 2015-06-20 by Garrett Wollman

I made two different recipes from Agatha Kulaga and Erin Patinkin’s Ovenly (Harlequin, 2014): “Salty Super Dark Chocolate Brownies” and “Cinnamon & Ancho Chile Brownies”. While I’ve had my complaints about this cookbook before, both of these recipes turned out as advertised, with no hitches during preparation. Although the “Salty Super Dark” recipe is actually the second one in the book, I made it first, figuring it would give me a better handle on how the authors’ brownies come together.

The unique feature of these brownies is the enormous amount of cocoa powder they contain: an entire cup of natural (the authors call it “American-style”) cocoa powder, which I measured at 95 g, plus a quarter-cup of Dutch-process cocoa. (They actually recommend a specific Dutch-process cocoa from Guittard, as well as a specific trendy Brooklyn espresso powder, neither of which I had, so I used the same Valrhona cocoa and Spice House espresso powder as I used in other recipes.) There’s three quarters of a teaspoon of salt in the batter, in addition to the Maldon flake sea salt sprinkled on top, and nearly equal amounts of granulated and dark brown sugars (again, I used India Tree dark muscovado).

The construction for this recipe follows a variant of “Procedure 2” as described in part 2 of this series; in this case, the cocoa is considered a “dry” ingredient, and blended with the flour, rather than being blended with the butter; it might be worth experimenting to see if doing it the other way around would enhance the chocolate flavor.

These brownies definitely are dark, and I’m willing to bet that if I had used a darker cocoa (Guittard, I believe, makes a natural cocoa that’s much darker in color, but I chose to buy the TCHO instead) they would have been darker still. This recipe specifies a 13×9 baking pan, but unlike all the other recipes in this size, the suggested serving size gives 15 portions per batch. I was going to cut it in 24, like all the others, but when I did the nutrition calculations, I found that 15 per was actually a reasonable serving size, comparable to brownies baked in 8×8 pans, like the next recipe.

Kulaga and Patinkin’s “Cinnamon & Ancho Chile Brownies” use a combination of natural cocoa powder and dark (not unsweetened) chocolate for their chocolate flavor — and of course they also have cinnamon and powdered chile for an extra spicy kick. They recommend using at least 60% cacao chocolate; I used TCHO 66% baking discs for this recipe, and in the future would consider bumping it up even more, although I suspect it would also go nicely with Valrhona Manjari 64%. This recipe uses three eggs, as compared with other recipes that call for either two (for 8×8 pans) or four (for 13×9 pans); the flour amount is increased to two thirds of a cup to compensate. The recipe suggests adding nuts and/or chocolate chips to this recipe, which I had planned to do but then forgot to include. A dusting of confectioner’s sugar is also suggested, but as this does not freeze well I omitted it.

As you can see, these are clearly less dark than the “Super Dark” brownies but still quite acceptable.

Evaluation results

The “Cinnamon & Ancho Chile Brownies” were a surprise for many of the tasters, who had expected not to like them but came away making comments like “my new favorite”. Overall they scored quite well, 4.1 on the 1–5 scale (n=5), good enough for a solid fourth place, despite receiving only one absolute “favorite” vote. These brownies also received high marks on the “chewiness” and “moistness” scales, but somewhat lower on “chocolate flavor”, perhaps because the spices masked some of the chocolate. The “Salty Super Dark Chocolate Brownies” were a disappointment: while they were evaluated by more tasters, they received consistently worse-than-average marks in all four categories, with an overall impression score of 2.7; this came as a surprise to me, because I quite liked them. (However, these were by far the saltiest of the brownies on offer, and at least some tasters were put off by that; I’m less sensitive to saltiness than many others.)

Nutrition

Salty Super Dark Chocolate Brownies

As the name suggests, these brownies are far from qualifying as “low sodium”. However, if you like your brownies broad and flat, they might be a good choice, at only 251 kcal for a much larger surface area per serving than any of the other recipes.

Nutrition Facts
Serving size: one 2½”x3″ square (52g)
Servings per recipe: 15
Amount per serving
Calories 251	Calories from fat 135
% Daily Value
Total Fat 15g	22%
Saturated Fat 9g	45%
Trans Fat 0g
Cholesterol 80mg	27%
Sodium 226mg	9%
Potassium 19mg	1%
Total Carbohydrate 28g	9%
Dietary fiber 4g	17%
Sugars 19g
Proteins 4g	8%
Vitamin A	14%
Vitamin C	1%
Calcium	2%
Iron	10%

Cinnamon & Ancho Chile Brownies

This recipe, however, does qualify as “A Low Sodium Food” according to FDA regulations. It’s also really really tasty; if you like spicy food as much as I do, you’ll have trouble sticking to just one serving.

Nutrition Facts
Serving size: one 2″x2″ square (47g)
Servings per recipe: 16
Amount per serving
Calories 227	Calories from fat 108
% Daily Value
Total Fat 12g	18%
Saturated Fat 7g	36%
Trans Fat 0g
Cholesterol 52mg	17%
Sodium 51mg	2%
Potassium 14mg	0%
Total Carbohydrate 28g	9%
Dietary fiber 1g	4%
Sugars 21g
Proteins 3g	6%
Vitamin A	7%
Vitamin C	0%
Calcium	1%
Iron	5%

Posted in Food | Tagged Agatha Kulaga and Erin Patinkin, browniefest, brownies, chocolate, Ovenly, recipe

Browniefest part 5: Joanne Chang’s “Fudgy Mascarpone Brownies”

Posted on 2015-06-19 by Garrett Wollman

This was the first recipe I had done from Chang’s latest book, Baking with Less Sugar. As I’ve told numerous people, this book should really have been titled Baking with Less Granulated Sugar; the emphasis is not on reducing sugar so much as getting the sugar from other ingredients — in this case, 14 ounces of bittersweet chocolate, more than twice as much as any other recipe calls for. Chang specifies at least 68% cacao for this recipe; ordinarily I would have used Valrhona Guanaja, but I didn’t have any, so I bought a couple of blocks of Callebaut 70% (exact formula unknown) at Whole Foods, and ended up needing only one of them. This recipe uses four whole eggs, and as the name suggests, gets its fudgy texture from mascarpone, the Italian fresh cheese best known from tiramisu.

In terms of ingredients, this is one of the simpler recipes, although it is leavened; all of the flavor and perhaps half of the sugar comes from the chocolate, but that’s filled out with 140 g of granulated sugar. Mascarpone, as the title suggests, is the only unusual ingredient. The butter looks a bit odd because some of it was previously melted by mistake and resolidified in the refrigerator; since it was all going to be melted again (and it never got hot enough to evaporate the water or brown the proteins) this was not an issue.

The assembly follows a variation on my procedure #2 (see part 2 of this series), with the mascarpone beaten together with the eggs before adding the granulated sugar. These brownies bake for only a very short time, although I found in my oven that that it took towards the longer end of Chang’s estimate to meet the specified “few wet crumbs” termination condition.

I finished this batch late in the evening, so I saved my portion on a plate for lunch the following day after all the rest went into a plastic bag to be frozen.

Evaluation results

I thought these brownies were excellent in the texture department, but a bit lacking on chocolate flavor — something which could perhaps be remedied by using a different dark chocolate as the flavoring, like my old friend Valrhona Guanaja, or even a higher-test chocolate (of which there are now some, made specifically for baking rather than eating, in the 72–75% range). The tasters seemed to agree, giving high marks on moistness but ranking them sixth in the overall evaluation (3.9 score, n=5); one taster chose this recipe as overall favorite. All of the evaluation scores were better than “average” (3.0), although this may be confounded by one taster who was evidently confused about which was which and gave them a rating in the “topping” category.

Nutrition

As with the other brownie recipes we’ve looked at so far, these count as “A Low Sodium Food” under FDA regulations.

Nutrition Facts
Serving size: one 2″x2¼” square (47g)
Servings per recipe: 24
Amount per serving
Calories 216	Calories from fat 126
% Daily Value
Total Fat 14g	22%
Saturated Fat 9g	45%
Trans Fat 0g
Cholesterol 52mg	17%
Sodium 46mg	2%
Potassium 23mg	1%
Total Carbohydrate 17g	6%
Dietary fiber 0g	0%
Sugars 6g
Proteins 2g	4%
Vitamin A	6%
Vitamin C	0%
Calcium	1%
Iron	3%

Posted in Food | Tagged browniefest, brownies, chocolate, Joanne Chang, recipe

Browniefest part 4: Two Cook’s Illustrated recipes

Posted on 2015-06-19 by Garrett Wollman

Two of the recipes I made for Browniefest came from Cook’s Illustrated: the first, by Andrea Geary, was originally published in the magazine in 2010, and the second (no author attribution) was published some six years earlier. I found both by searching online (I have a subscription to cooksillustrated.com) but the 2010 recipe was recent enough that I actually had the original magazine. I believe at least one of these recipes has been featured on America’s Test Kitchen TV as well.

The two recipes don’t have a whole lot in common: “Chewy Brownies”, the 2010 recipe, is specifically all about the texture of the cake (or bar or whatever you want to call it); it has a lot of chocolate, and no topping, but they went to great lengths to replicate the ratio of saturated to unsaturated fats from boxed brownie mixes, whereas “Classic Brownies with Coconut-Pecan Topping” from 2004 is more about the combination of chocolate, coconut, and pecan flavors. Interestingly, the evaluators rated the older recipe significantly higher on all attributes, even chewiness.

“Chewy Brownies” calls for a great deal of chocolate, but a substantial part of it was in the form of hand-chopped bittersweet chocolate chunks, which were not melted — giving rise to numerous complaints about the finished texture. It’s possible that if these brownies had not been frozen for storage, the chocolate chunks would have remained softer and been less objectionable for those tasters. In any event, the recipe headnote calls explicitly for Callebaut L-60-40NV, which luckily I can still get at my local Whole Foods, so the first part of the process was chopping the chocolate, and then filtering out the “waste” (small pieces of chocolate which actually would melt if used) to get the specified 6 oz of chunks.

The rest of the “Chewy Brownies” mise includes two egg yolks (it was one of two recipes to call for egg yolks in addition to whole eggs), Dutch-process cocoa, unsweetened chocolate (I used TCHO for both), butter, sugar, salt, and flour. Unlike many of the recipes, which have a bare half-cup of flour, this recipe calls for nearly two cups (8.8 oz) of flour, and it is also the only recipe to use vegetable oil, in addition to butter, to provide a fat balance closer to that of boxed brownie mixes (which use a combination of oil and powdered shortening). Espresso powder is used as a flavor enhancer.

Both Cook’s Illustrated recipes contain detailed instructions for pan preparation, including making a foil sling, but unfortunately don’t account for the fact that a roll of foil is 12 inches wide but a 13×9 baking pan is 13 inches wide. I ended up adding some little scraps of foil around the corners to keep things from sticking to the pan — although it’s a good non-stick pan and shouldn’t need it, but I’m a bit paranoid after previous brownie-baking experiences where I didn’t take adequate care of pan prep.

The procedure is my “Procedure #3” from my “Procedures and Ingredients” post (part 2 in this series). The fully baked “Chewy Brownies” look nice and dark here cooling on the rack.

The older recipe, “Classic Brownies”, is quite a bit different, although it makes the same number of servings and uses the same size pan. This recipe uses four whole eggs, rather than two whole and two yolks, and only one form of chocolate, plain unsweetened chocolate (I again used TCHO 99% dark chocolate critters). This recipe is the only one of the fifteen to use cake flour, and I used nearly the last of my King Arthur “Queen Guinevere” bleached cake flour — now discontinued — to make this recipe. It’s also leavened, and judging by the proportions, I suspect you could easily substitute self-rising flour for the cake flour, salt, and baking powder. Finally, “Classic Brownies” use more butter (no oil!) and more sugar than “Chewy Brownies”, and no bitterness-enhancing espresso powder. The procedure is what I identified as “procedure #1” in part 2.

If you scroll up you can see very clearly that these brownies are much lighter and redder in color than the “Chewy Brownies”; I attribute that to the lack of both Dutched cocoa and espresso powder in the “Classic Brownies” recipe.

These weren’t just “Classic Brownies”, but “Classic Brownies with Coconut-Pecan Topping” — also known as “German Chocolate” topping, after Mr. German’s chocolate cake, which has a similar gooey coconut curd used as a filling. The topping is made with toasted pecans and coconut, of course, bound together with a curd made from sugar, butter, cream, and egg yolks.

The topping is spread on the brownies before portioning, and then the whole pan is refrigerated overnight to set.

As with most of these recipes, I had a serving before packing these brownies up for transportation to the office. In this case, I left them in the 13×9 pan — this was the next-to-last recipe I baked — in the refrigerator until the appointed day and time.

Evaluation results

The “Chewy Brownies” were not rated highly by the tasters, with an overall rating of 2.9 (n=6), just below average on my scale but in the bottom half of all responses; they were rated 3.2 on “chocolate flavor” and an above-average 3.8 on “chewiness”. The “Classic Brownies with Coconut-Pecan Topping”, on the other hand, came in third overall, with a score of 4.3, albeit with a very small sample size (n=2), and tied for first place (5.0) in the “topping” category (out of 10 recipes from all bakers that had toppings). This roughly matches my own impressions; I did not think the extra effort involved in making “Chewy Brownies” was rewarded by any improvement in either texture or taste, but the coconut-pecan topping seemed to be worth doing again (perhaps on a different brownie base that can stand up to it with a bit more chocolatey flavor and color).

Nutrition

Both of these recipes count as “A Low Sodium Food” under FDA regulations.

Chewy Brownies

Nutrition Facts
Serving size: one 2″x2¼” square (55g)
Servings per recipe: 24
Amount per serving
Calories 255	Calories from fat 117
% Daily Value
Total Fat 13g	21%
Saturated Fat 5g	25%
Trans Fat 0g
Cholesterol 36mg	12%
Sodium 81mg	3%
Potassium 26mg	1%
Total Carbohydrate 34g	11%
Dietary fiber 2g	6%
Sugars 23g
Proteins 3g	6%
Vitamin A	2%
Vitamin C	0%
Calcium	2%
Iron	11%

Classic Brownies with Coconut-Pecan Topping

Nutrition Facts
Serving size: one 2″x2¼” square (63g)
Servings per recipe: 24
Amount per serving
Calories 316	Calories from fat 153
% Daily Value
Total Fat 17g	26%
Saturated Fat 8g	41%
Trans Fat 0g
Cholesterol 70mg	23%
Sodium 101mg	4%
Potassium 14mg	0%
Total Carbohydrate 38g	13%
Dietary fiber 1g	6%
Sugars 29g
Proteins 3g	6%
Vitamin A	7%
Vitamin C	0%
Calcium	2%
Iron	2%

Posted in Food | Tagged browniefest, brownies, chocolate, coconut, pecans, recipe

Browniefest part 3: Alice Medrich’s “Best Cocoa Brownies” and “New Classic Chocolate Brownies”

Posted on 2015-06-18 by Garrett Wollman

The two recipes I made from Alice Medrich’s Seriously Bitter Sweet (Artisan, 2013) were “Best Cocoa Brownies” (p. 69) and “New Classic Chocolate Brownies” (p. 67). They were so similar that I didn’t even bother to take pictures of the “New Classic” variety, although that recipes does in fact have one of the odder procedures — it just wasn’t particularly photogenic. So the photos below are for the “Best Cocoa” version; I’ll discuss the differences between the two. (Medrich also supplies five other variants of “New Classic” that I did not try; these might be interesting for a smaller tasting just to see what the effect is.)

Medrich says that the recipe works with either natural or Dutch-process cocoa powder; I used TCHO natural cocoa powder. I included the optional nuts (walnuts), because that’s what I like. “New Classic” uses unsweetened chocolate (TCHO 99% dark chocolate critters) rather than cocoa for flavoring, and reduces the butter to keep the fat roughly constant; other proportions are the same. I also used walnuts in that recipe, so it was possible to do a side-by-side comparison. Both recipes are unleavened.

Both recipes are prepared in an 8×8 baking pan, lined with parchment or foil; I prefer parchment, and I also applied baking spray (although it was not called for) to ensure a clean release.

Both recipes called for an odd bain marie melting procedure, which was strange enough that I actually followed it. (For other recipes calling for melting butter and/or chocolate in a double boiler, I used the microwave instead, which is just as good and uses much less time and energy.)

The sugar, cocoa, and salt for “Best Cocoa Brownies” are added with the bowl still on the heat; the procedure is otherwise identical to my “Procedure #1” as described in my “Techniques and Ingredients” post. For “New Classic”, the instructions depart from the normal procedure after the flour is added; Medrich writes, “beat with a wooden spoon or a rubber spatula until the batter forms a cohesive mass and comes away from the sides of the bowl … don’t stop stirring until it does.” I gave it about three minutes, and decided that was enough, in spite of the fact that the batter never “came away from the sides of the bowl” as I would understand it. Usually, brownies are treated like cakes in that gluten development is something devoutly to be avoided; “New Classic” is unusual in that Medrich seems to be desiring a great deal of gluten development. (I could always add more gluten, in any number of ways, if that’s really what’s needed — but I use King Arthur flour anyway, which has higher protein even in “all purpose” than most other brands.)

“New Classic” departs from the usual procedure in a second way as well, which I neglected to capture: they are baked at a very high temperature, for a shorter than usual time, and then cooled in an ice bath — or at least as much of an ice bath as I can make, with only a single ice-cube tray to my name and no room in the freezer to store ice. The folks at the Test Kitchen poo-poohed this procedure, and I certainly can’t claim from my experience that it did anything useful at all. Medrich provides “Classic” variants that use a more normal procedure; I suspect I’d have to do A/B/X testing to know if it really makes a difference (and if so, whether that difference is one that I actually desire).

After cooling, both recipes were depanned and cut into 16 2×2-inch squares, the suggested serving size.

I ate one serving of each brownie — luckily the weather was sunny so I could get out on my bike and work off those calories — soon after they were prepared and finished cooling, before bagging and freezing them. Since these two recipes were completed first, they also spent the longest time in storage before being brought out for Browniefest.

Evaluation results

The results may have been influenced by the fact that they were the very first batch most tasters encountered, but “Best Cocoa Brownies” were by a large margin the panel’s favorite recipe, with 4 out of 13 “favorite” selections, a first-place overall rating of 4.6 (n=5), and first-place or tied-for-first rankings in “chocolate flavor”, “chewiness”, and “moistness/mouth feel” categories. “New Classic Chocolate Brownies” came in tenth overall with a 3.4 score (n=4), despite getting one “favorite” selection.

Nutrition

These two recipes don’t differ that much in nutrition, being nearly identical in serving size, calories, and macronutrients. Both are “A Low Sodium Food” under FDA regulations, having less than 140 mg Na⁺ per 40 g.

Best Cocoa Brownies

Nutrition Facts
Serving size: one 2″x2″ square (41g)
Servings per recipe: 16
Amount per serving
Calories 197	Calories from fat 99
% Daily Value
Total Fat 11g	17%
Saturated Fat 6g	28%
Trans Fat 0g
Cholesterol 42mg	14%
Sodium 47mg	2%
Potassium 26mg	1%
Total Carbohydrate 21g	7%
Dietary fiber 2g	7%
Sugars 16g
Proteins 3g	6%
Vitamin A	6%
Vitamin C	0%
Calcium	1%
Iron	20%

New Classic Chocolate Brownies

Nutrition Facts
Serving size: one 2″x2″ square (41g)
Servings per recipe: 16
Amount per serving
Calories 202	Calories from fat 99
% Daily Value
Total Fat 11g	17%
Saturated Fat 4g	20%
Trans Fat 0g
Cholesterol 38mg	13%
Sodium 46mg	2%
Potassium 27mg	1%
Total Carbohydrate 24g	8%
Dietary fiber 1g	5%
Sugars 16g
Proteins 3g	5%
Vitamin A	5%
Vitamin C	0%
Calcium	1%
Iron	1%

Posted in Food | Tagged browniefest, brownies, chocolate, recipe

Browniefest part 2: Techniques and Ingredients

Posted on 2015-06-18 by Garrett Wollman

In my original post, “Thinking about Brownies“, I gave a list of the recipes I was looking to try, and I ended up doing all but two of them. Since I was going to be taking a week off from work, it was fairly easy to arrange to bake just a couple of different recipes each day, and store the finished, portioned brownies in my freezer. (Or so I thought, anyway — I ended up having to clear out the freezer to make room for brownies, and then put even more in the refrigerator.) I started by analyzing all of the recipes to determine the quantities of various ingredients each would require, which was made unnecessarily difficult by many (especially older) American cookbooks’ insistence on measuring compressible dry ingredients by volume rather than in sensible units. The other bakers were for the most part left to their own devices; they did not report back to me on what ingredients they used or even had to buy. I made a big matrix, with a row for each ingredient and a column for each recipe, although I ran out of room on my 8½x11 paper in both dimensions, and then used that to seed my shopping list. After the first round of shopping, I came home with large quantities of cocoa, chocolate, butter, sugar, eggs, and flour:

I ended up having to go back to the store several times after running out of eggs, butter, and sugar.

Ingredients

As I mentioned in the previous post, I tried to hold the ingredient brand and type constant while varying the proportions according to the recipe — although of course not every recipe used every ingredient. So nearly all of the recipes that called for “bittersweet” chocolate got TCHO 66% chocolate baking discs, and both of the recipes that used dark brown sugar were made with India Tree dark muscovado.

Procedures

There are three basic variant brownie-construction procedures:

Melt the butter, sugar, and flavoring together, and let cool, then beat in eggs, stir in dry ingredients, and fold in any other additions (such as nuts).
Melt the butter and flavoring together, and let cool. Beat eggs and sugar together, then fold in chocolate-butter mixture, then fold in dry ingredients and any other additions (such as nuts).
Bloom cocoa and other flavorings in boiling water, then emulsify with liquid fat(s) and eggs; mix with sugar and then fold in dry ingredients just until combined.

Many of the recipes call for doing the melting in a double boiler; with two exceptions I felt entirely free to use the microwave instead. Several of the recipes gave explicit microwave chocolate-melting instructions. Alice Medrich, in explanatory matter but not in her actual recipes, suggests refrigerating brownie batter in the pan for as long as two days for “a crustier surface”; this follows common advice for cookie batters.

Index of related posts

I’ll update this page with links to the posts as they are published.

Posted in Food | Tagged browniefest, brownies, chocolate, recipe

Browniefest

Posted on 2015-06-17 by Garrett Wollman

After a week of baking (on my part, not so much the other bakers’), we finally held Browniefest on Monday, June 15. I brought 14 batches of brownies to the office on Sunday:

…but the final batch, Emily Luchetti’s “Black Forest Brownies”, were highly perishable and had to wait until Monday morning for the finishing touches to be applied. More about that recipe later. I also brought all my leftover cream on Monday, and whipped it up as I usually do when I have leftover cream. I took all of the brownies out of the office fridge and let them come up to room temperature on our meeting table before putting them on cheap plastic plates for service and weighing. (I weighed them to come up with an average serving size for the nutritional information which will accompany this series of posts.)

Because it was raining, we had to told the event indoors. I set out three tables of brownies, and there was a fourth table with ice cream as well as my bowl of whipped cream.

We started service at 12:30; I personally skipped lunch (and dinner, for that matter) knowing that I would eat far too much, although I had no ice cream. A few of the bakers were late to the party and did not have their brownies sampled by as many of the participants; a few others had to bail at the last minute (but that was OK, we had plenty). I tried to get people to fill out evaluation forms that I had printed up for the event, but only a small fraction actually bothered to do so. (Perhaps if I had been standing at the head of the line handing them out it would have made a difference — I had intended to buy a bunch of golf pencils but forgot to look for them when I was buying the plates at Target.)

I felt (and still feel) fairly strongly that recipes ought to be tasted in something closely approximating their intended serving size, and if that means you end up eating larger portions of fewer items, then so be it — but some people felt otherwise and quickly began chopping up my brownies into tiny pieces. Most of the other bakers also supplied their brownies in much smaller than usual pieces.

The other bakers, in no particular order, were: Linda Julien (vegan), Tristan Naumann (box-mix gluten-free), Danielle Pace (homemade gluten-free), Ari Anders (dairy-free), Julie Sussman, Sue Felshin, and Ramesh Sridharan.

On the anonymous evaluation form, I asked participants to identify their preferred style of brownie. The responses were as follows:

Style	Number
cake-like	1
chewy	7
fudgy	4
crunchy (edge pieces)	3
no answer	4

I’ll present the actual evaluation results later this week.

Posted in Food | Tagged browniefest, brownies, work

Dear considerate Massachusetts drivers

If there’s a long line of cars behind you and you stop to let me turn across traffic, thanks, the courtesy is appreciated. If, on the other hand, there is no one behind you, I am already planning to make my turn after you, and it benefits neither of us if you slow down and force me to guess whether or not you’re yielding to me. This goes doubly so when I’m on a bike. Please don’t force me to dump all my momentum and unclip while I figure out what you’re doing when I could just cut in behind you at nearly full speed. Remember: I’m turning left, that means I have to yield to you, not the other way around. Sincerely, someone who has to share the road with you.

Aside | Posted on 2015-06-11 by Garrett Wollman | Tagged cycling, rant, right of way

Recipe quick takes: Four & Twenty Blackbirds’ Lavender Blueberry Pie

Posted on 2015-06-10 by Garrett Wollman

Blueberries are one of the finest flavors of summer, and even though they’re not yet in season here, big containers of them have been showing up in the supermarkets lately, imported from other states with earlier seasons. Meanwhile, it is lavender season. I’ve never used lavender as a food ingredient before, but Lavender Blueberry Pie from the “Summer” section of The Four & Twenty Blackbirds Pie Book (by Emily and Melissa Elsen; Grand Central Life & Style, 2013; p. 117) looked like a pretty easy and tasty pie to use some of those blueberries I picked up at the market — and so it turned out to be. The most complicated part of it was finding a source of food-grade lavender oil; I ended up having to mail-order it after I struck out at all my local sources. (Whole Foods carries lavender oil in the “body” section, but it’s not labeled for food use; of the other places I tried, Williams-Sonoma had dried lavender flowers, but not the oil, and none of the other retailers had either one.)

This pie uses the standard pâte brisée that most of the Elsens’ other pies use; I’ve already covered that recipe in full detail so won’t repeat it here. I’ve also covered the construction of lattice-topped fruit pies with another example from this same cookbook, which is why this is just a “quick take” and not a full walkthrough.

The mise en place is pretty standard for the Elsens’ fruit pies: lots of fruit, a baking apple (to be peeled and grated), arrowroot, fresh lemon juice, and sugar. The spice here is allspice, along with a couple dashes of Angostura bitters, and of course the aforementioned lavender oil — just a couple of drops, it’s very strong and goes a long, long way. There are two whole pounds of blueberries in this pie!

All of the ingredients are mixed together, with some of the blueberries being crushed by hand — if the Test Kitchen people got a hold of this recipe, I’m sure they would have cooked down half of the blueberries, driving off excess water to make a jam. The lattice top is painted with egg wash and then sprinkled with demerara sugar for browning. Like any double-crust pie, there’s no opportunity for blind baking the bottom crust, since it has to get crimped together with the top crust after the filling goes it; to make up for this, the Elsens say to preheat a half-sheet pan on the bottom rack of the oven at 425°F (220°C), and after 20 minutes of cooking, reduce the temperature to 375°F (190°C) so the top doesn’t burn.

And there’s the result. My pies — at least the ones I bake using the Elsens’ high-butter pie crust recipe — always tend to leak a lot of butter into the pan, and the crimp on this one didn’t quite stay up, so some of the filling leaked as well, thus the paper towels to keep the mess from dripping through the cooling rack and onto my countertop.

I took a slice for myself after the pie had completely cooled. As you can see, the filling was quite runny, but most of the blueberries had remained intact — I’m not sure if that meant I should have crushed more of them, or if this recipe is just expected to be that way. I would note that the top crust shown in the cookbook is not a lattice, like I made, but a fancier pattern that covers less of the filling, perhaps allowing more evaporation — but the instructions say you can even use a solid top.

This was my slice. The pastry was a bit weak where the lattice met the crimped edge, so the sides had a tendency to fall away, but it was still very tasty, with a noticeable (but not unpleasant) lavender scent and good blueberry flavor. I brought the rest of the pie into work (I took some time off from my vacation to attend a group lunch and our weekly staff meeting), and everyone who had some loved it — and they particularly liked the fact that there were still a lot of whole(ish) blueberries in the filling, rather than blueberry jam. As usual, they loved the crust; I’ve always had better response to this crust than my own opinion of it.

Nutrition

The recipe headnote says “8 to 10” servings, but I made this pie as 12 servings. Some of my coworkers took rather more than that, though!

Nutrition Facts
Serving size: 1/12 pie
Servings per recipe: 12
Amount per serving
Calories 334	Calories from fat 136
% Daily Value
Total Fat 15g	23%
Saturated Fat 9g	47%
Trans Fat 0g
Cholesterol 48mg	16%
Sodium 199mg	8%
Potassium 120mg	3%
Total Carbohydrate 48g	16%
Dietary fiber 3g	12%
Sugars 24g
Proteins 3g	7%
Vitamin A	12%
Vitamin C	13%
Calcium	2%
Iron	7%

Posted in Food | Tagged blueberries, Four & Twenty Blackbirds, fruit pie, lavender, pie, recipe

Occasionally Coherent

Browniefest part 8: Brooke Dojny’s daughter Maury’s “Best Brownies”

Evaluation results

Nutrition

Browniefest part 7: An update on King Arthur Flour’s “Double Fudge Brownies”

Evaluation results

Nutrition

Browniefest part 6: Ovenly’s “Salty Super Dark Chocolate Brownies” and “Cinnamon & Ancho Chile Brownies”

Evaluation results