September: Salted Fudge Brownies
Welcome to a new year of First of the Month! I started this Tiny Letter in September 2015 because I was unemployed and desperately needed a writing project while I looked for jobs. Twelve months later, a lot has changed, and I wanted to try a new theme for these essays. So for the next year, I'll be writing about one recipe on the first of every month. I like food so much that last night when our take out arrived, I did a dance in the kitchen.
On one of my early dates with Emily, I invited her over to make brownies. It was a few weeks after Hurricane Sandy, and I’d whipped up a plan to sell pies and brownies and cakes as a way to raise money for relief efforts. Emily pledged to buy a box of brownies, and offered to help with the baking. I said she could assist me in making a test batch, which was really just a way of getting her to come over and make out.
These weren’t just any brownies. During my years at the nursery school, where a stunning ratio of the staff were excellent bakers, I’d been introduced to a salted fudge brownie that is one of the best recipes I ever encountered. I call them Meredith’s Brownies, because it was my boss Meredith that first made them and passed around the recipe. (The actual recipe, from Food & Wine Magazine, would have you believe that they are Kate Krader's brownies, but in my world, they will always be Meredith’s Brownies). Just when you think you’ve seen enough trendy, salted desserts, here comes this delicious fudgy square of chocolate kissed with salt. The recipe calls for Maldon salt, but being cheap and lazy, I’ve made them with both table salt and whatever grocery store brand sea salt I have, and they’re always outstanding. The first time I made them, the roommate I lived with at the time became so obsessed that she multiplied the recipe by eight and made batches upon batches of them as Christmas gifts. (This was also the roommate who liked to shop at Costco, so that some nights when she asked if I wanted a skirt steak and I declined, she would cuss that she had sixteen frozen in the freezer and didn’t know what to do.) Often when I offer to bake someone a treat of their choice, they choose not a pie nor a birthday cake nor cinnamon rolls—they just want the brownies.
Returning to my date with Emily, I was excited to show off my baking skills in a flirtatious manner. The first time we had dinner, I told her I was a good baker and asked her what her favorite dessert was. “Oh!” she lit up. “There’s something my aunt used to make me, and I haven’t had it in years.”
“I bet I could make it.”
“It’s this strawberry jello thing, but the crust is made from pretzels, but there’s also a layer of Cool Whip. But it’s baked? I don’t know how. Or, maybe it’s served cold?”
I tried to hide my horror that she had just described a Midwestern monstrosity that I had never heard of. “Waitaminute, why is there jello? Where does the jello go?”
“On top. Or, wait. Yes, on top. And it has preserves in it.”
I was going to woo her with brownies.
In the small kitchen of my apartment, we measured flour, melted chocolate and butter, whisked everything together. We lined a square baking pan with tin foil, buttered it liberally, then poured in the batter. A few twists of sea salt on top, and voila - they went in the oven. Thirty five minutes later, I took them out.
“Whoa,” Emily said. “What happened?”
The brownies were not a fudgy masterpiece, but instead a gloppy mess. The edges were semi-baked, while the middle remained raw and wobbly. I gave it another ten minutes, and another ten minutes. By then, the edges were burned and the middle was hopeless. I took them from the oven and sulked. My roommate had arrived home and was horrified.
“Are those for your bake sale?” she squawked. “You can’t sell those!”
I opened the freezer, where I (neurotically) kept all of my many flours: AP flour, bread flour, oat flour, pastry flour.
Pastry flour.
In my haste to woo Emily (I made several romantic errors in my twenties, but inviting a girl over to bake has never been one of them), I had grabbed pastry flour. Pastry flour, a quick Google search revealed, is a lower gluten flour. Good for light and airy cakes. Bad for these dense brownies. It meant that they’d never get thick and gorgeous. They’d remain a half-baked mess forever.
It’s a credit to Emily that the disaster didn’t bother her. “I bet we could scoop it on ice cream and that it would taste great,” she said. Her positive attitude in the kitchen has gone on to save me from the cusp of many culinary metldowns. (Unless I am hungry. If I am hungry and the cooking is a disaster, then I am a snarky bitch who only wants Seamless and someone to make the dishes disappear.)
So here they are: Meredith’s brownies. I think they do best if you have time to refrigerate them overnight, but it’s not totally necessary, especially if you’re in the middle of a hot date.
xo,
c
Meredith’s Brownies
recipe from Food & Wine Magazine (December 2007)
1 1/2 sticks unsalted butter (Confession: I always bake with salted butter and never taste the difference, but I also inhale entire bags of tortilla chips in one sitting)
2 ounces unsweetened chocolate, finely chopped
1/4 cup plus 2 tables unsweetened cocoa
2 cups sugar
3 large eggs
1 1/2 teaspooons pure vanilla extract
1 cup all-purpose flour (beware the pastry flour!)
1/2 teaspoon Maldon sea salt (I’ve found any salt is fine; table salt is a little intense but still good. Some folks like to increase the salt to close to 1 tsp in this recipe, but I think that overwhelms them.)
Preheat the oven to 350°. Line a 9-inch square metal cake pan with foil, draping the foil over the edges. Lightly butter the foil. (Lol, lightly. I heavily butter it. If you’re in a pinch, a cooking spray works well, too).
In a large saucepan, melt the butter with the unsweetened chocolate over very low heat, stirring occasionally. Remove from the heat. Whisking them in one at a time until thoroughly incorporated, add the cocoa, sugar, eggs, vanilla and flour. Pour the batter into the prepared pan and smooth the surface. Sprinkle the salt evenly over the batter. Using a butter knife, swirl the salt into the batter.
Bake the fudge brownies in the center of the oven for about 35 minutes, until the edge is set but the center is still a bit soft and a toothpick inserted into the center comes out coated with a little of the batter. Let the brownies cool at room temperature in the pan for 1 hour, then refrigerate just until they are firm, about 1 hour. Lift the brownies from the pan and peel off the foil. Cut the brownies into 16 squares. Serve at room temperature.
P. S.
* Curious about the jello-pretzel-coolwhip-preserves thing Emily loves? It's called Strawberry Pretzel Salad. We've made it once (I joke that I had to go to many grocery stores to find Cool Whip and Jello - oh, Brooklyn!). The pretzel crust is amazing. The rest confounds me, but many folks have said that they know this dessert and love it!
* Last month I had the awesome pleasure of being a guest on Rachael Herron's How Do You Write podcast. Rachael, if you don't know her, is a dreamboat of a person and a powerhouse of a writer. She magically became my mentor through a mentor-pairing-thing I did, and she's helped me so incredibly much. Check out the podcast to hear me talk shop, laugh awkwardly, and confess my dream job (hint: it has to do with Beyoncé.)
* This fall is so jam packed with events that my calendar looks like a rainbow, but save the date: November 13th, The Hustle returns with a line up that will truly knock your socks off.
* Guinea pig + dog = best friends = all the squee