Squares of dark, fudgy cocoa brownies with a shiny crackled top and pockets of melted chocolate, one square cut open, flakes of sea salt on top

Cocoa Brownies With Brown Butter, Adjusted for Denver

A brownie lives in the gap between two better-defined things. It has the flour and eggs of a cake, but far less flour for its weight of sugar and butter, and this one has no baking powder or soda at all, so nothing in the pan rises. It sets dense and moist where a cake would open into crumb. Fudge is the other neighbor, and further off than it looks: a candy of sugar and milk boiled to the soft-ball stage and worked as it cools so the sugar sets in fine crystals, with no flour or egg anywhere. The first printed chocolate brownies, from 1904, had the balance worked out already: a cup of sugar to half a cup each of butter and flour, two squares of chocolate, two eggs, and no leavening.

These are cocoa brownies, and the cocoa changes the arithmetic. A melted-chocolate brownie gets much of its fat from the chocolate. Under the US standards of identity, unsweetened chocolate is 50 to 60 percent cocoa fat, while cocoa, as the standard defines it, is 10 to 22 percent. Sixty grams of standard cocoa brings no more than about 13 g of fat to this batter. The 150 g of butter brings roughly 120 g. So the butter does what cocoa butter does in a melted-chocolate brownie, supplying the fudginess, while the cocoa carries the flavor and the dark color. Browning the butter first adds a toasted, nutty note, and the browning explainer on Maillard and caramelization takes that chemistry apart. The 85 g of chopped 70 percent chocolate leaves a few molten pockets in every square. One bowl takes the hot butter, sugar and cocoa, then the eggs and a little flour, and an eight-inch pan turns it into sixteen squares. With no leavening to correct, the Denver adjustment below comes down to sugar and heat.

Natural or Dutch, in the same batter

Cocoa comes in two main kinds, and in a chocolate cake the leavening can decide between them. Baking soda needs an acid to make gas, so a cake raised with soda is written around acidic natural cocoa. Dutch-process cocoa, treated with an alkali to push its pH toward neutral, has less acid to give, and a cake built on it can lean on baking powder instead. This batter has neither leavener. Nothing in the bowl is waiting to react, the cocoa's acidity has no chemical job to do, and either kind goes in gram for gram. What changes is how the brownie looks and tastes.

Natural cocoa Dutch-process cocoa
How it is made Roasted cocoa pressed of much of its fat, then ground; nothing added The same, with an alkali applied to the nibs, the pressed cake or the liquor. US rules permit potassium or sodium carbonate, bicarbonate or hydroxide, among others
pH About 5.3 to 5.8 About 6.5 to 7.2 when lightly treated; above 7.6 when heavily treated
Color in these brownies Lighter brown Deep mahogany; heavily treated cocoas run toward black
Flavor Brighter, with more acidity Rounder; the alkali smooths the sour edge
Effect on rise here None; there is no leavening None; there is no leavening
How to tell on the label Cocoa is the only ingredient An alkali, such as potassium carbonate, follows the cocoa, or the label says "processed with alkali" or "Dutch-process"

The cocoa named in this recipe is Valrhona's (shop Valrhona cocoa powder), which lists potassium carbonate after the cocoa, so it is a Dutch-process powder, and it is the main reason these squares bake up so dark. Alkalized cocoa is darker, with a higher pH than natural cocoa, and a confectionery-trade history by Blommer Chocolate's Arlen Moser notes that the darker color gives the appearance of a more intense flavor. Bake the same batter with a natural cocoa and the brownies should come out lighter in color and sharper on the tongue. The method and the Denver numbers stay as written. The explainer on cocoa, cacao and raw claims sorts out the rest of the words on the tin.

The Dutch in the name is literal. Casparus van Houten, who had opened a small chocolate works on Amsterdam's Leliegracht in 1815, patented a press in 1828 that squeezed much of the cocoa butter out of roasted cocoa and left a cake that could be ground to powder. His son Coenraad Johannes, a chemist, is credited with treating that powder with alkaline salts, which tamed its sourness and helped it disperse in a drink, darkening it along the way. Moser dates the son's alkalizing patent to 1828 as well. The press is what made a low-fat cocoa powder practical, and with it, eventually, the cocoa brownie. The longer arc is in the chocolate history guide, from Mesoamerica to bean-to-bar.

Ingredients, for sixteen squares

  • 150 g (10 1/2 tablespoons) unsalted butter
  • 200 g (1 cup) granulated sugar (185 g in Denver; see below)
  • 50 g (1/4 cup, packed) light brown sugar
  • 60 g (about 3/4 cup, spooned and leveled) unsweetened cocoa powder, Dutch-process or natural, such as Valrhona (shop Valrhona cocoa powder)
  • 1/2 teaspoon fine sea salt
  • 2 teaspoons vanilla extract, such as Burlap & Barrel (shop Burlap & Barrel vanilla extract)
  • 2 large eggs plus 1 large egg yolk, cold
  • 60 g (1/2 cup) all-purpose flour
  • 85 g (3 oz) 70 percent dark chocolate, chopped; Valrhona Guanaja 70 percent fèves (shop Valrhona Guanaja fèves) need only a rough chop
  • Flaky sea salt, such as Maldon (shop Maldon sea salt), to finish (optional)

Method

  1. Heat the oven and line the pan. 350°F (365°F in Denver), rack in the middle. Line an 8-inch square metal pan with parchment, with an overhang on two sides to lift the slab out later.
  2. Brown the butter. Melt it in a light-colored saucepan over medium heat and keep going, swirling, until it foams, goes quiet, smells of toasted nuts and shows brown flecks at the bottom, 4 to 6 minutes. A light pan lets the color show. Scrape it into a large heatproof bowl, flecks and all, because the flecks carry the flavor.
  3. Bloom the cocoa. While the butter is still hot, whisk in both sugars, the cocoa and the salt until the mixture looks like wet sand and no dry cocoa is left. Leave it 5 minutes, until it is warm but no longer hot to the touch, so the eggs do not scramble.
  4. Beat in the eggs. Whisk in the vanilla, then the eggs and the yolk one at a time. After the last one, beat hard with a wooden spoon or spatula for about a minute. The batter turns from grainy and dull to thick and glossy and pulls away from the sides of the bowl. Stop there. This minute is where the shiny top is made.
  5. Flour, then chocolate. Stir in the flour only until the last white streak disappears. Fold in the chopped chocolate.
  6. Bake. Scrape the batter into the pan and smooth the top. Bake 22 to 26 minutes (18 to 22 in Denver). They are done when the edges are set, the center has lost its wet shine, and a toothpick in the middle comes out with moist crumbs but no raw batter.
  7. Cool, then cut. Cool completely in the pan on a rack, at least 2 hours. Lift the slab out by the parchment, scatter with flaky salt if using, and cut 16 squares with a hot, dry knife, wiping it between cuts.

What makes the crackled top

The thin, glossy skin on a good brownie starts in the bowl. In King Arthur Baking's explanation, sugar dissolved in the batter migrates to the surface as it bakes and sets there as a shiny film, and the egg white sets with it into something close to a very thin meringue. Lesa Tran, a chemistry professor at Rice University, describes the dissolved sugar rising and re-forming crystals at the top. Either way, the sugar has to be dissolved first.

Browned butter raises the stakes on that minute of beating. Unsalted butter is about 16 percent water by USDA figures, and the noisy foaming in the saucepan is that water boiling off; the milk solids only start to brown once most of it is gone. By the time 150 g of butter smells of hazelnuts it has lost most of its roughly 24 g of water, which leaves the eggs as the main source of water in the bowl for the sugar to dissolve in. Hence the hard beat until the batter turns from grainy to glossy.

King Arthur's tests turned up one more variable: otherwise identical batches came out dull without chocolate chips in the batter and shiny with them. The chopped chocolate here may be pulling that weight too, along with making pockets.

At a mile up

Denver sits at about 5,280 feet, and the Denver guide to cooking at altitude covers what that does to a kitchen in general. For a batter like this one the issue is evaporation. Water leaves faster at elevation, and Colorado State University Extension notes that the loss concentrates the sugar, which weakens structure. Its high-elevation cake table, for 3,500 to 6,500 feet, calls for up to 1 tablespoon less sugar per cup and a baking temperature 15 to 25°F higher. There is no baking powder or soda here, so the leavening row does not apply.

This recipe takes the sugar change on the granulated sugar, 15 g less, which is about 1 tablespoon for the 1 1/4 cups of total sugar. For heat it takes the low end, 365°F. A hotter oven sets the edges sooner, so start checking at 18 minutes. From 6,500 to 8,500 feet, the same table allows up to 2 tablespoons less sugar per cup.

Why it went wrong

Symptom Cause Fix
Cakey and dry Baked too long, or too much flour Pull them while the toothpick still shows moist crumbs; weigh the flour, or spoon and level it
Gummy, raw center Underbaked, or cut while warm Bake until the center loses its wet shine; cool the full 2 hours before cutting
Greasy, oil on top The batter was not beaten enough after the eggs Beat for a full minute until the batter is glossy and pulls from the bowl
Scrambled flecks in the batter The butter mixture was still hot when the eggs went in Wait the 5 minutes; the bowl should feel warm, not hot
Dull top, no shine The sugar never dissolved into the eggs; leaving out the chopped chocolate may also dull it Beat hard after the last egg until the batter turns glossy; keep the chocolate in
Edges hard, center fine (Denver) Sea-level timing at a hotter oven Start checking at 18 minutes; a metal pan, not glass

Notes and variations

Plain butter. Skip the browning and melt the butter until hot. The brownies taste more directly of cocoa and less of toffee. Espresso. A teaspoon of instant espresso whisked in with the cocoa deepens the flavor without tasting of coffee. Nuts. Replace the chopped chocolate with 60 g of toasted walnuts or pecans, or use half of each; walnuts are what the 1904 cooks used. Doubling. Double everything in a 9 by 13-inch pan and add 3 to 5 minutes to the bake. Keeping. Covered at room temperature they keep 3 days, and they are fudgier on the second. Wrapped squares freeze for a month.

For the bar side of the recipe, the craft chocolate guide covers which bars chop and melt well, and the explainer on what the percentage on a chocolate bar means covers the 70.

Where brownies came from

The word reached cookbooks before the chocolate did. The 1896 first edition of Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book has a recipe called Brownies made with butter, powdered sugar, Porto Rico molasses, an egg, flour and pecans, baked in small fancy tins with half a pecan pressed on each. There is no chocolate in it. The name was everywhere in those years: Palmer Cox's 1887 The Brownies, Their Book had made his mischievous little sprites famous, and companies borrowed the word for cameras, candies and cookies. Carla Martin, writing at US History Scene, describes the baked brownie as possibly named for Cox's sprites, a link no recipe or document has proven.

The chocolate brownie turns up in print in 1904, in two community cookbooks more than 800 miles apart. The Service Club Cook Book, compiled by a women's club in Chicago, gives "Bangor Brownies": cream half a cup of butter with a cup of sugar, add "two squares (one-quarter cake) Baker's chocolate, melted," two eggs, half a cup of pastry flour and chopped walnuts. Home Cookery, from the Congregational Church in Laconia, New Hampshire, prints almost the same quantities under the plain name Brownies, with vanilla and a little salt. Neither uses baking powder. The historian Mary Gage, setting the early versions side by side, reads the matching proportions as a sign that a single recipe was already circulating, and the Chicago title points to Bangor, Maine. Farmer's revised edition added a chocolate brownie close kin to the Bangor recipe. By the 1910 printing it called for a quarter cup of butter and a single egg, and was cut in strips.

Each of those chocolate brownies is a melted-chocolate brownie. The cocoa version on this page belongs to the same family, with dairy butter standing in for the cocoa butter.

Chicago's Palmer House tells an older story. In the hotel's account, Bertha Palmer, who chaired the Board of Lady Managers for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, asked the pastry chef Joseph Sehl for a cake-like sweet that would pack into a box lunch, and he produced a walnut-studded square with an apricot glaze. A brownie is still on the hotel's menu. It is a good story and an unverified one. The name came later: Gage finds "brownie" attached to the hotel's square only at an unknown date after 1893, and in 1897 a Sears, Roebuck catalogue was selling "Brownies" as a packaged cookie. Gage points out that the hotel's recipe, with about twice the chocolate of the early cookbook versions and its apricot glaze, does not look like an ancestor of the 1904 brownies. Tell it at the table as a Chicago tradition.

The shop is at 263 Josephine Street in Cherry Creek, Denver, where visitors can ask staff questions, and products ship nationwide from theambrosianpantry.com.

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