I Am America's Test Kitchen

A few months ago, I signed up to be a "friend" of Cook's Illustrated. No, it's not the kind of "friendship" made popular by Facebook or MySpace or some other social network B.S. site. This "friendship" entitles me to receive recipes the folks at America's Test Kitchen are testing and perfecting. As a friend, I can try the recipes out myself and give the fine folks at ATK feedback on them.

Perhaps this'll get me one step closer to having Charles Kimball over for supper one night and give him a taste of what real Tex-Mex is like, not that watered-down, cajone-less stuff he's used to in New England. After all...

I Heart Christopher Kimball

Sorry, I digress.

The first two recipes I received were nothing I would ever attempt to make. One, I seem to recall, involved bacon--and you're already well aware, I'm sure, Gentle Reader, of how I feel about bacon. The other was just...well, I don't have an inkling about what the recipe was for, but I do recall that it had no appeal for me. How can I judge the quality of a recipe if it's not for a food item that I want to eat?

A week or so ago, I finally got an email from Cook's Illustrated inviting me to test a recipe that I could actually see myself making for some uber-special occasion. The recipe's for soft and chewy brownies. Normally I pass on any kind of brownie recipe because they're loaded with fat and sugar--stuff I try my damnedest to avoid. I also tend to pass on such recipes because, hey, I can buy a box of Krusteaz fat-free brownie mix, toss in some water, stir, pour into a pan, bake and have brownies. I don't trust myself to competently mix together flour, sugar, cocoa, eggs and whatever else a recipe might call for and bake the goo the right way.

However, since it's been a long time since I've had the chance to really play in the kitchen (damn this summer heat!), I thought I'd give this recipe a whirl. I had most of the ingredients already on hand, the steps didn't seem overly difficult, and I thought perhaps I couldn't screw it up too badly thanks to the experience I've gained over the last 18 or more months. If I did the recipe right and I wound up with an edible batch of soft and chewy brownies, I could give share them with others and quickly get them out of my house. If they weren't edible, well...that's why I have a husband and a son.

Soft and Chewy BrowniesUnfortunately, Gentle Reader, my friendship with Cook's Illustrated prohibits me from sharing this recipe-in-progress with you. I don't know when the final version will be published or when it might be featured in an episode of America's Test Kitchen. But here's an overview of the ingredients, listed in no particular order:

• Dutch-processed cocoa
  
• Unsweetened chocolate
  
• Instant espresso powder
  
• Sugar
  
• Flour
  
• Eggs (whole and just yolks)
  
• Bittersweet chocolate
  
• Vanilla extract
  
• Vegetable oil
  
• Salt
  
• Boiling water

As you can see, Gentle Reader, there's nothing too terribly out of the ordinary in the recipe. You might say the espresso powder is a bit out of the ordinary, but understand that it's there to help bring out the flavor of the chocolate. That's a little something I learned from either Cook's Illustrated or America's Test Kitchen--or maybe from a copy of the King Arthur Flour Company's catalog, which is always full of fun recipes and baking tips. So while, for example, Mum in Bumblefuck, Okiemolah, can't readily find espresso powder at her local Wally World (which has, by and large, put all the other grocery stores in the area out of business with its price margins while simultaneously limiting the variety of merchandise available to consumers), I can find it easily at my local HEB.

The Faudie's Futzings
Because I'm testing a recipe-in-progress, I didn't feel I should futz with it at all because that would obviously defeat the purpose of the experiment and render my feedback useless. However, I might have inadvertently futzed with it just a tad bit due to my own ignorance or skinflintedness. Allow me to explain.

I have a container of Nestle cocoa powder. I have no idea for certain that it's Dutch-processed cocoa, but I have a vague memory of reading somewhere or hearing on some show that either it is or that most cocoa powders available in U.S. supermarkets are Dutch-processed--or the exact opposite. Could I have used Google to confirm that Nestle's cocoa powder is or is not Dutch-processed? Sure. But when I started making this recipe just after 6 a.m. on a Sunday morning and knew I needed to make a quick run to HEB to pick up more sugar and didn't want to have to buy another container of cocoa powder that would linger in the cabinet for years and years (as the Nestle's product has), I just didn't want to take the time or set myself up to spend the additional money.

Taking that time now that it's all said and done, I realize I was right: Most readily available cocoa powders are not Dutch-processed, but some of the larger makers do make Dutch-processed products. That said, when I was at HEB at the butt-crack of dawn this morning, I checked all the available cocoa powder products, and none of them stated specifically on their labels that they were Dutch-processed. Woohoo! I got to save some money!

Even before my shopping/research trip to HEB, I was thinking about this dilemma over whether Nestle's cocoa powder is Dutch-processed or not and developed this...justification for using what I had on hand: Your average baker is more likely to have a cannister of Nestle or Hershey cocoa powder in a kitchen cabinet than a cannister of Dutch-processed stuff. Considering my local HEB didn't offer a Dutch-processed product on its shelves--and this HEB is no stranger to offering a variety of unusual or "exotic" ingredients--I figured there's a high degree of probability that your average baker in, say, your typical Midwestern city isn't going to have ready access to Dutch-processed chocolate and will, like me, use whatever cocoa powder she or he has on hand.

Seems like a reasonable thing to think, wouldn't you agree, Gentle Reader?

That's just one example of my inadvertent futzing. Here's another one: The recipe calls for table salt. I don't have any regular table salt. I have reduced-sodium table salt, I have sea salt, I have kosher salt, and I have a small quantity of higher-end larger-crystal sea salt I bought for an Indian recipe and haven't used yet. Now I know from reading Cook's Illustrated or watching America's Test Kitchen that kosher salt and table salt cannot be substituted measure for measure. I seem to recall that less kosher salt is required to achieve the same effect of regular table salt. Since I (again) was too lazy to confirm how to competently substitute kosher for table salt, I just used my reduced-sodium table salt. I figured it probably wouldn't matter too much since salt is just used to help differentiate the various flavors--and there aren't too many flavors in this recipe that need differentiating!

The only other potentially result-altering futz I did involved the bittersweet chocolate. I was supposed to use a bar of the stuff that I was to cut into a certain size of smallish chunks that I was to then put into the batter before putting it into the pan. I instead used an equivalent amount of bittersweet, 60% cacoa chocolate chips. The chips were slightly larger and flatter than your typical Nestle Tollhouse chips, they with their perfect little curly q peaks, but they were not the same size as the specified size of chunks the recipe calls for.

Here's a slideshow of my morning's work for your titillation, Gentle Reader:

I Get Judgmental
So how are the finished brownies, sliced and served after two hours of cooling, as specified by the recipe? Well, I would not describe them as chewy so much. Yes, some slightly more vigorous mastication is required, but it's not the sort of mastication needed for something that's chewy; it's not quite the mandible workout I'd put in to something that is chewy. Or perhaps my sense of chewiness is skewed because I chew sugar-free gum all day to alleviate my chronic dry mouth.

I tried first a piece that had one edge from the pan. There's a bit of chewiness to that outer rim edge, but the texture away from the crust is more gooey, but not gummy and slightly runny as you experience with undercooked brownie batter. There's cohesion developed from exposure to heat and the chemical processes engendered by the heat.

Also, there's more gooeyness at those places where you encounter one of the bittersweet chocolate chips, which are like pockets of molten lava, except that they're chocolate and not red-hot mixtures of minerals and whatnot. (What the hell does comprise lava? Guess I should ask the boy since he's all into volcanoes.) If you don't stir in the chips/chunks well enough and wind up with pockets of them throughout your pan, you could have a slightly sticky, gooey mess that's damn tasty but a bit of a brownie loss nevertheless.

Next I tried a corner piece and observed that because more of it had been exposed to the baking conditions that ensue from its close contact to the pan, it had more chewiness. But away from that outer edge, the "guts" of the brownie were still more gooey but cohesive.

Finally, I had a small piece from deeper inside the brownie pan. I must not have sprayed the aluminum foil in that spot with enough baker's cooking spray (the stuff that has flour to help ensure easy release of baked goods) because some of the bottom crust stuck to the foil. Eh, no big loss in all reality--ya just swiped it off with yer fingertip and lick it off! However, did that "leave behind" signal a failure of the recipe or of the baking time (two minutes longer than specified by the recipe) or of something else? I can't say for sure. I suspect if I just made sure the foil was well-coated with the spray before pouring in the batter, I wouldn't have the problem again. But I'll know more as I cut into and attempt to remove more pieces from the center of the brownies.

As for the flavor and texture of my third piece, it was very similar to the "guts" of the other pieces: gooey but cohesive. It was perhaps a bit more gooey, but it did not, fortunately, have the texture of raw or barely cooked brownie batter. I don't know about you, Gentle Reader, but I've had more than a few pans of box-mix brownies come out of the oven with burnt-crispy edges and raw-batter-gooey centers. Not that I find the goo off-putting. No, I'm more upset by the burnt-crispy edges because I just don't like baked goods with dry, crisp, crumbly crusts and edges. They taste bitter to me and often have an icky aftertaste.

To make this culinary experiment (read: misadventure) a bit more objective, I asked the boys to sample the finished product and share with me (and you, Gentle Reader) their observations about the taste and texture of the brownies. While the boy only got an outer edge piece, the husband tried the same types of pieces I did: a corner piece, a piece from the outer edge and a piece with no outer edge. Here are the husband's notes:

overall--pretty good brownie

good brownie texture--firm on the outside, almost gooey on the inside

flavor OK, but could be more chocolatey--some bites seemed to have more flavor than others--seemed as though flavor was less intense (less chocolately) near edges, more chocolately (sometimes overpoweringly, but not in a bad way) near center

liked finding the gooey, melted chips

I suspect his desire for a "more chocolatey" flavor stems from a preference for a sweeter chocolate. Let's face it: Most folks in America are used to milk chocolate that, in the past few years, has become more filled with wax and other icky stuff than ever before. Growing up, I was experienced with two sorts of chocolate: milk chocolate in candy bars (before government regulations loosened to allow more wax and other fillers, much to the outrage of chocolatiers in the E.U.) and semisweet chocolate in the bags of Nestle Tollhouse chocolate chips Mum used in her cookies and in the bars she used occasionally for other sweets. I recall not liking dark chocolate all that much, but my only experience with it back then was the Hershey Special Dark miniature bars I got occasionally at Halloween or other holidays.

Now, however, I find I prefer dark chocolate--the more cacao, the better! Perhaps it's a reaction to all those fillers that have radically altered, in my estimation, the flavor of milk chocolate. Perhaps I don't have quite the sweet-chocolate sweet tooth I once had (that's doubtful). More than likely, though, I think I find the flavor of a higher-cacao chocolate more satisfying because, hey, the flavor sticks around a lot longer on the taste buds. Or at least it seems that way to me.

For some folks--perhaps including the husband, that higher cacao content strikes them as more bitter than sweet when their taste buds are expecting a sweeter flavor from chocolate after years of consuming milk chocolate or other forms of chocolate that don't have as much cacao. So I suppose, Gentle Reader, you can take the husband's observation about the brownies lacking a certain level of chocolatey flavor as a warning that if you prefer sweeter chocolate, then these brownies may leave you wanting.

As for the boy...well, how sophisticated of observations can you expect from a six-and-a-half-year-old little boy who really doesn't have the yen for chocolate that a lot of other people have? For your amusement, here are the boy's thoughts, as captured by the husband:

mmm--it's good

it tastes more chocolatey on the inside

texture--just perfect

the best thing of all is that it is yummy

it has a good aftertaste--tastes chocolatey

it's chocolately and its crumby

Heh, crumby. I hope he means crumby as in "in the state of having crumbs," not as in "lousy, awful, no good, wretched" and so on and so forth. I'm not sure how he came to observe the brownie's quality of having crumbs since I didn't think his piece crumbled much. Then again, considering the slovenly way the boy eats, perhaps he mistook the crumbs left behind after his open-mouth chewing as a sign that the brownie itself was given to having excess crumbs.

The Final Verdict
After consuming some test brownies and talking over our findings with the boys, I filled out a survey for Cook's Illustrated about my baking and eating experience of the recipe. We gave the recipe a 9 out of 10, and I noted that I might make the recipe again (although I didn't get to note on a scale of likely I was to make it again, which I think is a relevant question to ask).

Fortunately, the survey gave me an opportunity to share exactly how I strayed from the recipe--although I spared them my ruminations on Dutch-processed cocoa versus other types of cocoa--and other specifics about my experience with the recipe. I wish the recipe had stated somewhere that its goal: "A soft and chewy brownie with great chocolate flavor and the chewiness found in box-mix brownies." Knowing that would have given me some context in which to frame my observations because honestly, these brownies blew away anything I've ever made from a box (which admittedly is limited to Krusteaz fat-free mixes, No Pudge Fudge fat-free mixes and Betty Crocker's regular and reduced-fat mixes--not exactly a broad experience of boxed mixes, right?)

Now that I've filled out the survey, how soon can I expect that call from dear Christopher Kimball about when he'll be coming to Chez Boeckman-Walker for a taste of real Tex-Mex?