Gooey bittersweet brownies

January 7, 2016 at 9:14 pm (Alice Medrich, Brownies and bars, B_minus (2.5 stars), Uncategorized)

I already have an Alice Medrich cocoa-only brownie recipe I like a lot, but this one was featured on the Food52 Genius Recipes page, and has been getting rave reviews for its ultra gooey, ultra chocolatey qualities. 

The instructions say to bake until a toothpick plunged into the center emerges slightly moist with batter, 20 to 25 minutes. At 20 minutes our brownies were liquid. At 25 minutes the toothpick was still emerging more than “slightly” moist. So I cooked them for 30 minutes and then took them out. Once they cooled off, we tried them. They didn’t seem overcooked, but we surprisingly didn’t love them. They tasted very sweet, and not at all bitter. Also, the texture wasn’t quite right. Did we screw something up? Or do we just prefer a more traditional brownie? I’m not quite sure.

I will say that the brownies seemed better on day 2 than day 1, and better on day 3 than day 2. (That’s as far as they made it.)

We put nuts in half the brownies, and I definitely preferred the nutty brownies better. They helped cut through a bit of the chocolatey goo.

Here’s a quick comparison of our old “low fat” recipe to this new gooey version. The new ones have twice as much butter, 1.5 times as much cocoa, and half as much flour. So quite a big difference!

	Old “low-fat” recipe	New “Genius” recipe
Butter	5 Tbs.	10 Tbs.
Cocoa	1/2 cup plus 1/2 Tbs.	3/4 cup + 2 Tbs.
Eggs	1 egg + 2 egg whites	2
Flour	1 cup (4 oz)	1/2 cup (almost 2.5 oz)
Sugar	1 1/4 cups	1 1/4 cups
Baking powder	1/4 tsp.	none
Vanilla	1 tsp.	1/2 tsp.
Espresso	1 tsp.	none
Salt	1/4 tsp.	1/4 tsp.
Nuts	not mentioned?	2/3 cup, optional