"Study Bake" Brownies

I had been waiting for the right moment to make them. With no papers pressing, the morning sun gone, and rain clouds moving in, the afternoon seemed right to take a study break and stretch my emerging chocolate baking skills with Alice Medrich's recipe for Classic Unsweetened-Chocolate Brownies from her book, Bittersweet.

A friend suggested I call my "study break bake" a "study bake," and this round was definitely a study in baking brownies as I needed to adjust the amount of ingredients because of the chocolate I would be using.

A few months back, my mom received an 85% cacao, 3.5 oz bar of Valrhona. A bit too bitter to eat as a bar, this very excellent chocolate needed an excellent recipe to showcase it. The problem: I could find no recipe that uses an 85% bar. Recipes are based on the standard 58%, 66%, or 70% blend of chocolate liquor with the requisite sugar to total 100%. Alice's book makes it clear that stronger chocolates can affect the taste and texture of recipes in unexpected ways because of the chocolate and sugar percentages, thus other ingredients need to be adjusted appropriately.

Alice writes, "The effect of increasing liquor and decreasing sugar is exaggerated because manufacturers usually add less extra cocoa butter to chocolate when they increase the total amount of chocolate liquor (which has cocoa butter in it), so the amount of nonfat dry cocoa solids increase more than the fat as the percentage of chocolate goes up. The effect of using a higher-percentage chocolate is a little like adding cocoa powder to a recipe and subtracting sugar at the same time" (p. 345).

Get that? That's why this was definitely a "study bake" brownie. I needed to calculate the decreased amounts of sugar and butter and the increased amount of chocolate required for this recipe to compensate for the 85% bar. Add to this the fact that the recipe called for 4 oz. of chocolate, I only had one 3.5 oz bar, and I would make up the difference with the leftover 100% squares from the Chocolate Whiskey cake, it became a complicated little equation.

Given that brownies are always yummy as long as they are not totally overbaked and dry, I figured trying to calculate the adjusted amounts for brownies would be safer than attempting something else. And with the taste of brownie comfort still lingering on my palate as I now sit and blog, I think my inclinations were correct - for the most part - at least for taste.

The recipe called for 4 oz of unsweetened chocolate with 8 T (1 stick) butter and 1 1/4 cup sugar. In the appendix of Alice's book, she has guidelines for substituting 50-58%, 62-64%, 66%, and 70-72% for unsweetened (aka 100%) chocolate. No guidelines for substituting 85%, but doing the calculated estimations, I decided to go for 3.5 oz 85% + 1.5 oz. unsweetened, with the full stick of butter and 1 cup of sugar.

After the non-Alice whiskey chocolate cake recipe, I was glad to return to my chocolate diva. I am thankful for the little tidbits she provides to assure the newbie baker I be that I am on the right track.

For example, though I now feel comfortable melting chocolate, this recipe required a slightly different approach. Because all the ingredients would be added into the melted chocolate and butter, the mixture needed to be hot enough. How hot? "Hot enough that you want to remove your finger fairly quickly after dipping it in to test." Taste testing, I mean, temperature testing the chocolate with my finger was not only effective, it was fun, especially since I had the opportunity to lick off and sample the evidence a good 6 times until it was "just right."

After adding the 1 cup sugar, 1 t vanilla, and 1/4 t salt, then the two eggs, one at time, the 1/2 cup flour came next as the batter truly appeared "smooth, glossy." As it began to "come away from the sides of the bowl," just as Alice said it would, I continued to beat with my rubber spatula for 1-2 minutes as instructed. The picture doesn't really reflect it, but I was encouraged to see the batter in my bowl behaving just as Alice said it should. It came from the sides like a big brown glob of liquid silly putty. It was cool.

Because I've learned that my mom's oven is a bit hotter than Alice's, less time is needed. Rather than 20 minutes at 400 degrees, after about 18 minutes, the brownies looked "dry" on the surface and began "to pull away from the sides of the pan," as Alice said they would, indicating they were done. The inserted toothpick was more "gooey," than "quite gooey" when it came out from the center, but the brownies smelled warm and wonderful as the tray went into the ice bath to cool per Alice's instructions.

I probably should have let the brownies cool a bit longer than I did before trying to cut them, but Alice didn't give a time and I was anxious to sample. There's just something about a warm brownie (with walnuts - about 2/3 cup) on a cold and wet day that brings an assuring embrace of comfort.

Though the taste was a bit sweeter than I expected, there was a subtle bittersweet bite that created a wonderfully complex chocolate symphony which is hard to describe in words. The depth of flavor is probably due to the quality of chocolate used. It's sweet - yet not too sweet. It has a bittersweet bite - yet not too bitey. Though there was no coffee or alcohol, there was a rich sophistication. The walnuts created a wonderful balancing crunch to the gooey brownie texture, and stood up to the strong chocolate tones with its bold nutty accents.

While I really like the taste of these brownies (which are definitely better than the boxed ones I've made), I have 3 issues with how they came out. I don't know if it was me, the substitutions I made, or heaven forbid, Alice's recipe, but...

(1) The brownies were a bit oily -- not a bad oily, just a bit oily. I should have went with my original calculations of deleting 1/2 teaspoon of butter rather than being lazy and using the full stick. I think the extra 1/2 teaspoon plus the oily nature of walnuts were a bit too much.
(2) The brownies were crumbly and simply did not hold together well when I cut them.
(3) And as I cut them, they stuck to the foil liner which Alice said to use to get the brownies out of the pan onto a board to cut. She said foil or parchment. I think parchment would have been a better choice.

Thus, if you can imagine, because these brownie were a bit oily, crumbly, and stuck, cutting them was a frustrating nightmare. The one good thing about it all is that the chocolatey mess, which stuck to the cut bits of foil and lay all over the cutting board, did give me an excuse to eat up all the crumbs and to delay the research for another paper. That, I thoroughly enjoyed.

Now it's back to the books.