Nothing hits the spot quite like an ooey, gooey brownie. Especially if, like us, you're a major chocolate lover. They're easy to whip up and always a crowd pleaser at any gathering. However, if you like to get crafty in the kitchen and tinker with your favorite recipe, it's best to know exactly what your tinkering can cause. After all, unlike cooking, baking is quite an exact science.
To prevent less-than-stellar batches, understanding how each individual variable can affect the outcome of your beloved brownies is key. Ultimately, brownie preference is in the mouth of the beholder—some prefer cakey while others can't get enough of that slightly fudgy interior.
For this experiment, we baked a very traditional brownie to see exactly how temperature, baking pans, and ingredients affect your finished dessert. Here's what we found out:
CONTROL BROWNIE
Ingredients:
- Melted butter
- Granulated sugar
- Natural unsweetened cocoa powder
- Kosher salt
- Whole eggs
- Vanilla extract
- Flour
Process:
- Combine sugar, butter, cocoa powder, and salt.
- Add eggs, one at a time, then stir in vanilla. Fold in flour.
- Bake at 350° in a metal pan.
After baking our control, we then set out and changed a single variable to make seven different batches. Here’s what we learned:
1. Temperature
350° is a common baking temperature for a reason. Most of the time you will see a brownie recipe use this temperature because it will help the inside and the outside cook at relatively the same time. A lower temperature could potentially lend to a fudgier brownie, but the ingredients and how they are used in a recipe are the true indicator of how your brownies will turn out.
2. Brown Sugar Vs. Granulated Sugar
Brown sugar gives brownies notes of caramel and molasses, which, depending on the taste tester, could be a good or a bad thing. (Most of us in the test kitchen are into it.) Brown sugar also retains its moisture better than granulated sugar does, giving you a chewier brownie.
3. Glass Vs. Metal Pan
In general, metal bakeware, ideally aluminum, conducts heat nicely. This also means it'll cool more quickly once removed from the oven. Glass tends to burn the outsides of baked goods faster and once a glass pan heats up, it stays HOT for a long time. This means your brownies will take longer to cool. Due to these differences, glass pans typically work best with a lower temperature setting and longer bake time to achieve optimal results.
4. Butter
Ahh, the perpetual question when it comes to baking: melted or softened butter? In brownies, the latter leads to cakier results because you're beating more air and lift into the batter. In doing this, you're also diffusing the chocolate flavor. Brownies made with melted butter tend to be more fudgey and have a stronger cocoa flavor.
5. Type of Fat
If it's a chewy texture you're after, oil is better than butter. But after tasting what seemed like a million brownies, our test kitchen much preferred the taste of brownies made with butter. Do with that what you may.
6. Type Of Cocoa Powder
Dutch cocoa brownies are generally denser, darker, and much richer. Everyone on the kitchen team prefers them. But if the steep price point upsets you, know that you can use natural unsweetened cocoa and Dutch cocoa interchangeably in most brownie recipes, with one caveat: as long as there is no baking soda present. At least, you can in all of our recipes!
7. Melted Chocolate Vs. Cocoa Powder
We found that when it comes to a fudgy brownie, melted chocolate is much better than cocoa powder. Moisture is needed to create a fudgy brownie so using a milk or semisweet chocolate is ideal, but even a bittersweet or dark chocolate will yield a fudgier result than a brownie made purely with cocoa powder. The more cocoa powder you have in a brownie the drier it will be. Using a combo of both melted chocolate and cocoa powder can help balance out getting a fudgy brownie with a rich chocolate flavor.
