Rich and Dark Brownies

Recipe

May 31

These are not your childhood brownies. They are luxurious, decadent, and rich. This recipe uses layers of chocolate so you get different tastes of chocolate with each bite. You can add in chocolate chips or nuts if you like, but you might trade the richness a bit for that extra flavor or crunch.

These brownies look a bit more cakey than gooey, but that is not what you will get when you take a bite. These melt in your mouth with the sweetness of the semisweet chocolate followed by the richness of the unsweetened chocolate. They are simply not like any brownie you have made before.

What Do I Need?

This recipe uses a water bath. As you are getting out your ingredients, put 1 inch of water in a saucepan and bring it to a boil. Turn it down to a gentle simmer before you but your butter and chocolate over it to melt them.

I like to use stainless bowls over a water bath because the bowl will cool more quickly after you take it off the heat, allowing the mixture to cool more quickly also.

Line your baking pan with parchment to keep the bottom from burning or sticking to the tray. I will show you a little trick with the parchment to make it easier to get your brownies out of the pan too.

And as always, I weight my ingredients instead of measuring them by volume, so my scale is important to me.

What I use:

Tips and Tricks

When you line your baking pan with parchment, cut it so it is exactly the width of the bottom in one direction, and sticks up about an inch above the pan on both sides in the other direction. This results in little handles that you can grab and lift the brownies out of the pan and onto a cooling rack. Then when they are cool, you can cut them on the paper and just peel the paper off as you pick them up. No more pieces of brownies left behind in the pan!

You will melt the butter and chocolates over the water bath. Put the butter in the bowl first, and the chocolates on top, so the butter starts melting first.

Simply use a rubber spatula to mix as they melt. Once it is nearly melted, you can pull the bowl off the heat and keep stirring until it is all smooth.

The bottom of the bowl will be wet from the steam, so have a towel handy to wipe it off.

Keep the bowl level as you remove it from the water bath, so no steam gets into your melted chocolate. Water in this mix can make the chocolate seize up and be harder to work with.

When you mix the sugar, salt, eggs, and vanilla, you want to be gentle. If you use a whisk, do not beat it or whip it into a foamy mixture. You simply want to mix.

Whipping the eggs will add air, and leavening, into the mixture. You will get more cakey brownies and they may become crumbly instead of rich and moist.

The mixture should be just mixed, as shown in this picture - this little bit is all you need.

Before you add the chocolate mixture, make sure it is completely cooled so you don’t cook the eggs at all. Scrambled eggs in your brownie….ew.

Adding in the cooled chocolate, you will again want to ‘just mix’ them into the eggs. You can either gently use a whisk, or fold with a rubber spatula.

Sift in your flour and use a rubber spatula to gently fold it in. This time, you are trying to avoid developing any gluten in your mixture by working the flour in too much. Gluten will again give you more cakey or crumbly brownies. While these have a cake texture, they will lose the melt in your mouth feel.

Again, the mixture will be ‘just mixed.’

Simply pour this into your pan and bake ‘low and slow.’