Progress

I made another batch of brownies yesterday and made some progress. I followed a basic Devil's Food cake recipe. I left out the baking soda and replaced the butter with a 3:2 oil and water mix. It seemed like my dry mix was the same amount as two boxes of brownie mix so I kept the two eggs. This time I had to spread the batter in the pan rather than pour it out like before.

The result? I updated my requirements in the previous post to include moistness. This new batch was not moist. But they did have that fudge quality I was looking for. I didn't get the flaky top like I wanted but I did get a crunchy top rather than the cake-like top from the previous batch. There was a wonderful chocolate aroma but not as much chocolate taste as I would have expected.

Dinah's comment was that they tasted like Betty Crocker's.

So I'm feeling good about this experiment. I need to tweak the ingredients some I think. I'll have to ponder how. It feels like I need more liquid or more fat or both. I think I need to compare my dry weight ratios with a box mix and see if I am adding enough oil and water. Six ounces of oil and four ounces of water seemed like a lot, but maybe it wasn't. I also might want to replace half of the cocoa powder with baking chocolate. I think this would add more flavor but also increase part of the fat content with cocoa butter hopefully adding some moistness.

Other options to explore include replacing the water with milk or substituting part of the sugar with light corn syrup. The previous recipe indicated that the corn syrup addition provided chewiness.

On Brownies

As I mentioned before, I thought I should attempt to make some home made brownies as the first step to approximating my favorite of brownies, Duncan Hines. I did so yesterday. But before I get to that, as an aside, if you didn't know, there really was a Duncan Hines. Before WWII, Mr. Hines would travel around eating at different restaurants and developed a rating system and a guidebook. His ratings were very coveted by restaurant owners. I believe this predates the more well known Michelin system or Zagat rating. It was later on in the 50s when he decided to get into the packaged food products for the busy American housewife. Anyway...

I followed a recipe from my The King Arthur Flour Baker's Companion: The All-Purpose Baking Cookbook. This book rocks. I highly recommend owning it. I got rave reviews from Dinah and Dinah's coworkers for these brownies but I did not like them.

What do I love about Duncan Hines brownies? They are:

1. Flaky on top.
2. Moist.
   
3. Chewy.
4. Fudge-like (I think the same as chewy actually).
5. Oily on the bottom (yes this is important).

The homemade brownies were definitely chewy but they were not flaky on top nor did they have the oily bottom. Looking at the ingredients, I am thinking that this recipe will not be a good base to build on. So let's do a recipe comparison of the main ingredients to see if we can find the secret. I don't have a box of Duncan Hines on hand but I can make some educated guesses as to what the ingredients are. The earliest credited fudge brownie is the Lowney Brownie from 1912.

Lowney	Duncan Hines	King Arthur
1 cup of sugar	sugar	2 1/2 cups of sugar + 1/3 cup of corn syrup
1/2 cup of flour	flour	1 1/3 cups of flour
2 squares of chocolate	cocoa powder	6 ounces of chocolate
1 stick of butter	1/4 cup of water + 1/3 cup of oil	1 1/2 sticks of butter
2 eggs	1 egg	5 eggs

Two quick notes, the Lowney Recipe is not proportional and I accidentally used 6 eggs when I made mine yesterday but I don't think that had any affect on my disappointment.

So the key difference appear to me to be in the fat content and type added and the emulsifiers content, i.e., eggs. It seems that fewer eggs equals more chewy (Duncan Hines' directions say to add two eggs for cake like brownies). So I'll carry that info forward for future experimentation.

The butter versus oil content is very interesting. It makes we wonder about how long the Duncan Hines mix has been around. Follow me on a short diversion. The cake mix that we are all most familiar with is the butter cake. The butter cake uses butter, flour, sugar, eggs and maybe baking powder. In the 1920s a guy named Harry Baker developed a cake called the chiffon cake. His secret was the use of oil as a fat instead of butter. Hmmm..... Chiffon cakes need egg whites to be whipped full of air for the cake to have body. That's not done with brownies. I'm not a food historian or even a food expert but it seems to me then that brownies then lie in a family of cakes in between butter cakes and chiffon cakes, a marriage of the two. By the way, Mr. Baker sold his secret recipe to General Mills/Betty Crocker after WWII and the rest is history. (I learned all of the watching Good Eats one day).

So I think the next step is to take a basic chocolate butter cake recipe, limit the egg portion of the recipe and replace the fat addition with oil. I haven't figured out the water role but maybe that is to rehydrate the cocoa powder.

Stay tuned.

End o' the Week Odds 'N' Ends

I didn't have much ambition today. I did melt down my trimmings from grinding my own beef in hopes of making my own tallow. At least I think I made tallow. I had ground the trimmed fat prior to running the lean meat through and then saved it. Today I put the ground fat in one of my medium sized cast iron skillets and put it in the oven at 225°F degrees. I think it took an hour or two. I poured everything off through some cheese cloth that I laid in a sieve. I bagged and froze the left over meat. Can't see anything wrong with eating it as ground beef. It's quite lean now I would think. I refrigerated the liquid fat. Interesting it separated into a think white solid on top and a thin yellowish solid on the bottom. I'm guessing the white part is the tallow. I assume that I can use it no differently than I would use lard. Maybe I'll make a candle.

I continue to practice making pizza. I'm getting pretty close to presenting I think. Today's dough was made without whole grain flour. I used unbleached all purpose flour. The crust was softer and lighter I think. I think I liked the taste of the whole grain flour crust better, but it is harder to work with. I have a pretty good supply of mill ground grain around here. I bought this last batch outside of Helen, GA, about 30 minutes from here. Instead of hand stretching the dough and baking it on the pizza stone, I used a jelly roll pan. Saved me the aggravation of my pizza peel always failing me. Dinah gave it a thumbs up and I am pleased with the results.

Apparently I had used up my supply of canned tomatoes in various forms in the pantry. All I had on hand was one can of organic diced tomatoes and one can of Mexican stewed tomatoes with green chilies and cumin. Bummer. So I made the sauce using both cans hoping the diced tomatoes would dilute the chile and cumin flavor of the stewed tomatoes. I grow my own herbs in my super-duper Aerogarden so I put in four good sized leafs of purple basil instead of the usual two. I also doubled the minced garlic. Taking a lesson from my Culinary Arts 100 course, I used my Kitchen Aid Immersion Blender to puree everything in the pot. Unfortunately by the time it was ready to cook the pizza the sauce hadn't cooked down thick enough so it was a little too thin on the pizza. BUT, I never noticed the chilies or the cumin.

I learned on the last pizza that REAL mozzarella on pizza is pretty nasty. You know the fresh kind packed in a brine, usually in small balls of cheese. Damn near flavorless on pizza. So while the bags of shredded low moisture mozzarella is the cheese to buy, I have learned that blending cheeses is the way to go. Don't use straight mozz. Tonight I put a thin layer of Parmesan on top of the sauce followed by a thin layer of shredded cheddar. Not enough cheddar to really be called a layer but enough to add depth. You can't even see it once it has melted. The top layer was a thick layer of shredded mozzarella. On one end though I used sliced mozz like you buy for sandwiches. I think that this actually tasted slightly better than the shredded mozz. It looks the same once melted but I also think there is a slight textural difference.

Almost ready to serve to others.

Being in the doldrums today I broke down and baked some brownies after dinner. I only bake and I only eat one kind, Duncan Hines. And I still lick the bowl. I've been doing it for 30 years at least and haven't gotten sick from raw eggs yet. You should have seen Rose knocking stuff down and toys out of the way scrambling to get to the kitchen to have a lick herself. And she's never had brownie batter before. That love is genetic!

I'm thinking maybe I need to research into making brownies from scratch. I agree with Dinah, Duncan Hines has it perfected but I would like to make a brownie as equally good in which I know what the ingredients actually are. Time to do some Googling and some reading.