Some people treat fudgy vs cakey brownie discourse like it’s a debate. It’s not; the latter is a chocolate traybake, and the former is a proper, you know, brownie.
After all, no less than the Cambridge Dictionary defines them as “a small, square chocolate cake that is soft in the middle.”
With that understanding, I’ve long been on the hunt for the fudgiest, densest, most chocolate-y of chocolate brownie recipes.
I’ve tried Gordon Ramsay’s (fine, but not quite the right texture), Nigella Lawson’s (delicious but, again, not as relentlessly squidgy as I prefer), and even Mary Berry’s (dare I say it; they were a little lacklustre too).
Only a few recipes stood up to my gooey-base, paper-thin crispy top standards; and all of them had a counterintuitive secret in common.
Which is?
It sounds completely wrong, but the densest, fudgy-est brownies I’ve made have never featured melted chocolate in the batter.
Part of the reason why that feels so untrue is that melted chocolate is so luxurious, so extravagant, and so, well, chocolate-y. Why would something so cocoa-lly good make a chocolate dessert less sumptuous?
All I can say is it turns out Bon Appetit found the same thing I did when testing brownie recipes: “As compared to those made with just chocolate or a combination of the two, cocoa brownies are reliably superior in terms of texture and flavour,” they shared.
That’s partly because chocolate contains a fat called cocoa butter, which is solid at room temperature (hence, you bite a chocolate bar rather than spread it on your toast).
But when you include cocoa powder, which contains next to none of the fat, your batter is forced to rely on the other fat in the mix for its texture ― butter.
Dairy butter is just about solid at room temperature, but much less so than its cocoa cousin.
That means brownies made without melted chocolate in the batter take on some of the property of the fat; they’re softer, more velvet-y, and gooier when cold.
Then, there’s a question of taste; good cocoa is, well, 100% cocoa, while chocolate will always be somewhat tempered.
That leads to a darker, denser, more chocolate-y flavour.
So what’s the best recipe?
I do actually add some chocolate chunks (never chips) to the brownie mix after it’s all combined. Because it’s not incorporated into the batter, it doesn’t affect the brownie’s texture as much, and it tastes amazing.
But if you ask me, a person who has tried about 32 different variations, the best recipe around is from Hugh Fearnely-Whittingstall.
I have screenshotted, sent, and then saved his steps on multiple email accounts and written them out physically in more than two notebooks in case The Guardian ever take the page down.
“For me, brownie nirvana is a crackled, shiny top beneath which lies a rich, dense and chewy middle, verging on the underdone,” the food pro wrote ― and he delivered.
The only note I have is to skip the walnuts he suggests as an optional add-in in place of chocolate chips. Come on ― we all know why we’re really here.