The Science Behind the Perfect Brownie - Kitchen Conundrums with Thomas Joseph

[Music] hey everybody Thomas Joseph here now everybody loves brownies but everybody also has a preference when it comes to Brownies whether they like them fudgy like this version here or cakey like this one here so let me show you how to do that there are five basic ingredients in a brownie batter chocolate butter flour sugar and eggs but if you play with the ratio you're going to end up with a different outcome so a fudgy brownie or a cakey brownie the ingredients that will change the overall texture are fats so that is the chocolate and the butter and also the flour ratio so in a fudgy brownie you're going to have more chocolate and more butter than a cakey Brownie and you're going to have less flour than you would in a cakey Brownie and if you like cakey brownies you're going to need a little bit of baking powder for that as well so I personally like a fudgy brownie so I'm going to start with that today into a bowl set over some simmering water I have 6 oz of bittersweet chocolate if you're making your cakey brownie that would be 4 oz of chocolate so a little less and I'm going to add a stick of unsalted butter right into the bowl now if you were doing your cakey brownie you would only use a half a stick of butter here so this is going to melt together until it's nicely combined and then we're going to add the rest of the ingredients so our chocolate and butter mixture is melted and combined I'm going to remove it from the Heat and you want to make sure that you wipe off any condensation that collects on the bottom of the bowl you don't want to incorporate that into your chocolate cuz it will make your chocolate sees and to this I'm going to add the sugar if you wanted a chewy brownie a lot of people like chewy brownies you can add brown sugar but today I'm adding granulated sugar and this is 1 and 1/2 cups and this is one of the core ingredients that does not change so I'm just going to gently stream this in while I'm whisking so that it melts into the hot chocolate and butter mixture it helps to cool the chocolate mixture down a little bit before we add the eggs this is another ingredient that's going to stay the same whether you're making a fudgy or a cakey brownie so drop your eggs into the chocolate one egg at a time make sure it's nicely combined before you add the next this is one of my my favorite brownie recipes not only because I like fudgy brownies but also because you make this in one bowl and that's it you don't need a stand mixer for this recipe it's really easy and light on the mess so there's the third egg so now for um extra chocolate flavor a/4 of a cup of unsweetened cocoa powder and Dutch processed cocoa powder is really great here because it gives you that wonderful chocy flavor and a really dark dark color natural cocoa powders give you more of a red chocy color in your Brownies so a little bit of salt here to bring out the flavor and now I'm going to switch to a rubber scraper here and I'm going to fold in the last ingredient and that is the flour so for a fudgy brownie I'm using less flour so that's a half a cup plus 2 tablespoons of allpurpose flour but if you wanted cakey brownies you would use almost three times as much flour so that's 1 and 1/2 cups of flour so gently fold this in make sure that you scrape down the sides here because you want to make sure that you don't have any flower Pockets or streaking in your batter and this now would be the point where you can add in mixing so if you want walnuts if you want pecans if you wanted some chocolate chunks you can add that at this point as well but I'm just going to do straight up brownies today I have an 8 by8 in square cake pan here and I've done my little trick which I love is lining with parchment buttering in between so so that the parchment sticks to itself and this makes it easy to pop the brownie right out of the pan so make sure your oven is preheated to 350° and for the fudgy brownie that I'm making today it takes about 35 to 40 minutes but if you were making the cakey version it only takes about 30 minutes so set your timer our brownies are baked make sure that you cool them before cutting them and now you should be able to lift it in one piece and now for cutting a little bit of hot water make sure you wipe off the hot water and this brownie recipe gets cut into nine squares and just wipe your knife off in between cuts I like to use a very thin blade carving knife would be really great and this crackly surface it's all dependent on how much you beat the batter after you add the eggs because you're creating some volume and that volume translate into the baked good with this papery top so there you have it fudgy brownies or cakey brownies kitch and conundrum solved [Music] enjoy

Channel: Everyday Food

Views: 7,683,729

Keywords: Recipe, Recipes, Cooking, Cook, Food, Dinner, Easy meal, Dinner tonight, Everyday Food, Home made, Sarah Carey, Martha Stewart, Family meal, easy cooking, how to, food ideas, quick dinners, fast recipes, easy recipes, quick recipes, Brownies, Chocolate (Food), Brownie Mix, How to, How to bake, Perfect Brownies, Brownie Hack, Baking, Baking Hack, Cook (Profession), Kitchen, Thomas Joseph

Id: HIonKbKM-tE

Length: 5min 24sec (324 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 07 2015