mix, mix…stir, stir

This week’s Tuesdays with Dorie recipe brings us back to the controversial topic of brownies. I fall squarely in the fudgy gooey rather than cakey brownie camp, and was curious where this week’s Brownie Buttons would land.

 Having tasted them, I am inclined to say they are of a cakey style, but admittedly this could be due to over baking them. The tiny molds bake up so quickly and though the thought briefly crossed my mind to shave a few minutes off of the baking time, I proceeded to set the timer for the suggested 14 minutes. When I pulled them out they looked over baked to me, and no surprise they were a bit dry.

It’s possible to determine what the likely end result of a recipe will be before investing the time and ingredients in making it by evaluating the ingredient ratios. Shirley Corriher talks about this in her books Cookwise: The Secrets of Cooking Revealedand BakeWise and Michael Ruhlman recently published a book devoted to the basic formulas of recipes. In his book, Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking, he presents basic formulas rather than recipes by giving the ingredients in proportion to one another. The sourdough bread I just pulled from the oven was made using this method. He has a great post about this bread on his blog. Not to get too side tracked, but his post ties into the Two Sisters Bakery and their recent post on creating sourdough starter using red cabbage, which works like a charm. The bread I made was a ratio of 1 part sourdough starter, 1 part water, 2 parts flour and 1% of the total weight in salt.

 A few weeks ago Michael Ruhlman initiated a discussion on Facebook about the ratios for brownies and I was curious to know the ratio of my favorite brownie recipe to see how it compared to others. The Tuesdays with Dorie group has made a number of brownie recipes from the book and I thought it would be interesting to compare the ratios of the different recipes to see where the Brownie Buttons fall.

I based my calculations off the weight of the butter and consider a large egg to weigh 2 ounces.  My scale is not sensitive enough to measure the small amounts of salt and flavorings, and because they are so small I don’t think they have a significant impact on the texture of the brownies, so I am leaving them out of the equation. I will use my brownie recipe as an example of the calculations. My recipe uses 4 ounces of butter, which I considered to be 1 part. Given this,  the two ounces of unsweetened chocolate equates to 0.5 parts calculated by dividing 2 ounces (weight of the unsweetened chocolate)  by 4 ounces (weight of my base ingredient, butter). Two tablespoons of cocoa power is 2 ounces by weight, so it’s also 0.5 parts. One cup of flour weighs 5 ounces, so 1/3 cup is 1.66 ounces, which is then divided by 4 ounces to express this as a ratio of the butter, coming up with 0.42. A cup of sugar weighs 7 ounces, divided by 4 equals a ratio of 1.75. Two eggs weigh 4 ounces which is equal to the weight of the butter making it a 1 to 1 ratio. I did this for each of the different recipes basing the calculations off of the weight of the butter that each recipe calls for.

The results are a bit difficult to interpret because I am not accounting for the effect of the fat and sugar content of solid chocolate or the effect of cocoa powder, but there are a few parallels that are notable. My recipe and the Tribute to Katherine Hepburn recipe have nearly identical ratios and are indeed both fudgy gooey brownies.  The Classic Brownies are billed as a fudgy but not gooey. I would agree and I suspect the added fat from the solid chocolate is what keeps them from being cakey despite the much higher proportion of  flour, sugar and eggs. The French Chocolate Brownies were definitely cakey. I am surprised to see the proportion of flour is so low but maybe the cakey texture is due to the lower level of sugar or the added water and rum that I categorized as liquid.

So back to the brownie buttons. Looking at the ingredient ratio I am inclined to think that if I had only baked them for 11-12 minutes they would have been moist and lovely. They contain half the amount of egg, and a lot less sugar than my recipe, but there is additional sugar in the bittersweet chocolate. The flour seems to be in the middle of the pack, so I’d say they could go either way. Clearly I need to make another batch for research purposes.

The brownie buttons did have a really nice flavor twist from added orange rind. Though I would add zest from a whole orange rather than just half in the future. The flavor was bright and fresh in the batter, but once baked I couldn’t detect it. White chocolate is called for as the icing, but I was fresh out and instead used some cream cheese frosting I had tucked away in the freezer.

I didn’t realize how appropriate my little brownie analysis is until just now; Jayma of Two Scientists Experimenting in the Kitchen selected this week’s recipe! Though my analysis falls woefully short of anything truly scientific, it was interesting to me and I suspect this might just become a bit of an obsession that will soon involve complicated charts of dozens of different brownie recipes. I had better just stop now.

Over 350 baking bloggers are baking our way thorough Dorie Greenspan’s book, Baking: From My Home to Yours . 86 recipes completed 135 to go!