For a while now I’ve had a dream of perfecting a handful of recipes. You probably have the same dream: to possess a small store of reliable recipes you can whip out for bake sales, dinner parties, and date nights, and cook with confidence because you know they will always, always come out just the way you want them to.

What’s that? You mean this isn’t your dream, too? No one does bake sales anymore (thanks, covid) and dinner parties are old-fashioned? Surely we still have date nights!

Well, at any rate, it’s my dream, and for a while it seemed like it was going well. I made a truly astonishing number of chocolate chip cookie batches until I found one that was just right, and found the perfect gingerbread cookie recipe on the second try. But then I tried brownies and here, dear reader, is where I ran into trouble.

Five different recipes later and not only had I not found one close to what I was looking for, I didn’t have the slightest idea why none of them worked. Worse, I was beginning to experience an existential crisis. Did the perfect brownie even exist? Could it exist? Was the platonic ideal of a brownie I held in my mind–thick, fudgy, a little chewy, dark but not bitter–something I could ever produce? Maybe brownies were just inherently disappointing. In desperation I turned to a box mix, reasoning that something so highly engineered would at least make a good baseline, a starting point. I was wrong.

I stopped after that. Don’t get me wrong, I haven’t given up: the search for the perfect brownie does not end here. But it does pause here, because if I see another brownie I may do something drastic. In the meantime, I want to leave some notes here so I can more easily pick up where I left off.

Recipes

Of course the first recipe I tried was from Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything. I had taken a stab at his recipe several years ago and made a few tweaks that I felt improved it, but coming back to it I felt even my modified version was disappointing.

From there I moved on to, naturally, Smitten Kitchen and Deb’s favorite brownies. For once, I was disappointed by SK: we liked the flavor but found the texture too cakey to be the fudgy brownie of our dreams.

Who else was a reliable source for baked confections? King Arthur Flour came to mind, and I found their fudge brownies recipe. I’d already started measuring before I realized the 2 cups of chocolate chips in this recipe are mix-ins, not melted in: all the chocolate flavor in the brownies comes from cocoa, not melted chocolate. This was a disappointment to me because I feel cocoa brownies, like cakey brownies, are in their own class–potentially delicious, but not to be compared to fudgy brownies. I also feel that mix-ins may be acceptable but are usually a bad idea and should never be necessary. Still, I’d already started so I persevered and found, again, the texture to be all wrong.

A couple of links led me to a different King Arthur recipe, this one for deep-dark fudgy brownies. I was instantly skeptical about the presence of powdered sugar but decided to give it a shot. This was our least favorite brownie. MC declared it to not even be a real brownie and said it tasted like stale frosting. I found the flat, sweet flavor of the powdered sugar utterly overwhelming and the texture a little gummy. I won’t say we didn’t eat them–they were still made of sugar and chocolate, after all–but we didn’t enjoy eating them.

Eventually, it occurred to me to try one of my go-tos for reliable recipes: Tartine. The newer Tartine cookbook provided my perfect gingerbread cookie recipe, so I gave their brownie recipe a shot. In a twist on tradition, they have you beat your eggs and sugar to the ribbon stage as you do for some cake recipes. This puzzled me, since that technique is used to add fluff or loft to cakes and seemed counterproductive in a brownie recipe. I wound up making this recipe twice, once as written and once using the same ingredients but following a more traditional brownie-making method. Both bakes came out about the same. We agreed this was our favorite recipe so far but, ironically, we found it too fudgy. If you’d blindfolded me and put I bite in my mouth I would have guessed it was slightly stale fudge, genuine candy, rather than a baked good.

	Bittman	SK	KAF: F	KAF: D-D	Tartine
Chocolate (oz)	1.5	1.5	0	0	3.2
Cocoa (cup)	0	0	0.3	0.2	0
Butter (cup)	0.25	0.25	0.25	0.166	0.15
Sugar (cup)	0.375	0.65*	0.56	0.166**	0.45***
Egg	1	1	1	1	1
Flour (cup)	0.25	0.3	0.375	0.3	0.2

At some point I’ll return to this quest and continue searching for the perfect brownie… until then, I think I’ll go bake something without any chocolate in it whatsoever.