The Best Brownies You'll Ever Make (Bakery-Quality)

I'm Frank Proto, professional chef

and culinary instructor,

and today I'm gonna show you

how to make the best brownies you've ever had.

We're talking dark, decadent, delicious, fudgy brownies.

This is Brownies 101.

I personally like my brownies thin, dark, and fudgy.

Fudgy brownies have so much more going for them

than a cake-like brownie.

Cake-like brownies are dry.

They're a little spongy.

These are chewy and gooey.

They have a great mouthfeel,

and they're just more satisfying than a light

and fluffy brownie.

[upbeat music]

You should prepare your pan

before you start mixing any of your ingredients.

You want it ready to go when your batter is ready.

I have a 9-by-13 metal pan.

You could use glass, but glass holds onto the heat,

and I find that my brownies tend to overcook in glass,

so that's why I like metal.

Once you take it out of the oven,

the heat dissipates a lot quicker.

Because my pan is so deep,

I like to line it with some parchment paper.

And even though I'm using parchment paper,

I wanna be sure to butter it

because I don't want the parchment to stick to the pan,

and I want it to come out really easy.

So I'm gonna get it really buttered well.

Up on the sides, in the corners, right,

and I want parchment,

just to be sure these brownies come out of the pan.

I'm gonna get it into the corners,

and you see how that butter

makes the parchment stick really well, which I love.

And then what I do here,

this is origami with Chef Frank,

I want the parchment to cover the bottom of the pan.

This little sling will hold our brownies into like a loaf,

and kind of keep that integrity of the brownies.

They won't crumble and fall apart as we take them out.

So you can see that I have my pan lined really well.

Let's move on to making our batter.

[upbeat music]

So I have all the ingredients laid out

for my brownie batter.

I'm gonna start with chopping up some chocolate

that we're gonna sprinkle on top of our brownies

before they go in the oven,

and I don't mind if it's like different sizes,

some big chunks, some small chunks.

I like that you get the bite of that fudgy brownie,

and then the toothiness of the chocolate chip.

When I put chocolate on top of the brownies,

I like to use something that's not super sweet,

so I tend to go for a bitter chocolate,

something in the range of like, you know, 70% cocoa.

The brownies are sweet enough themselves.

The chocolate is just gonna be a little bit

of a bitter accent,

which I really like.

You can see that I'm not shy with the chocolate either.

I use chopped chocolate instead of chocolate chips

because this is just a better-quality chocolate.

Chocolate chips would be perfectly fine,

but I find when you buy better ingredients,

you get a better end product.

Now that the chocolate's chopped,

I can make the batter,

and I like to start out with my dry ingredients.

I'm gonna sift them.

If you don't wanna sift them,

you can always just put 'em in a bowl

and whisk them together.

I take the flour,

goes into the sifter.

If you don't sift, you could get lumps in your batter,

and that is not pleasant.

So we want to have all the dry ingredients

combined really well so there's no lumps, okay?

Cocoa powder.

I try and find a nice dark cocoa powder,

like Dutch-processed,

which makes the cocoa a little more mellow,

but it makes it a lot darker and richer.

With every recipe,

I try and find the best ingredients I can buy.

I tend to stay away from brands like Hershey's.

It's an okay product.

I just feel like it's bland,

and it's kind of like not dark enough,

and it doesn't have a lot of chocolatey flavor,

believe it or not.

I have my salt.

I have my baking powder, which is my leavener.

I have some instant coffee powder.

Now, if you've never done instant coffee powder

in your brownies, you really don't taste the coffee,

but it's kind of a flavor enhancer to chocolate.

So a little bit of coffee powder really does boost

that chocolate flavor.

So if you're worried about there being too much caffeine

in your brownies,

first of all, we only used a very small amount.

Second of all, if you don't like it, you can take it out.

Take my whisk and push this through into the bowl.

If you look, there's kind of like little lumps

and stuff like that,

and that's not pleasant mouthfeel.

You'll get a bite of salt,

maybe you'll get a bite of dry cocoa,

and it's not really delicious.

Time for the wet ingredients.

And part of the reason why I do my dry ingredients first

is that I can blend them together,

and then I can use the same whisk

because I don't wanna clean two whisks

to do my wet ingredients.

So I have my white sugar and brown sugar.

Now, the reason I'm using two sugars

is the white sugar is there for just basic sweetness,

and the brown sugar has some richness

from the molasses in it.

It also helps make our brownie a little more fudgy

and a little more gooey.

Part of the reason I like to use my sugar

as a wet ingredient

is that sometimes brown sugar has lumps as well,

and if you add it to the liquid ingredients,

it breaks those lumps up,

and I don't wanna have lumps of brown sugar, right?

So I'm using some vegetable oil or neutral oil,

and I'm using some melted butter.

So what the oil does

is it makes our brownies nice and tender and fudgy.

It gives the texture of the brownie that we want,

whereas the butter is giving us some flavor.

Some vanilla extract,

and then four whole eggs.

Of course, we need eggs.

Eggs are one of those things

that like is the magic ingredient for most baked goods.

They add moisture, they add fat,

they add flavor,

and they basically hold everything together.

Eggs are the glue of baking.

And then I'm just gonna break everything up.

And now, all I'm gonna do with this

is really bring it together.

If I have any lumps, break it up with a whisk,

and just make sure it's combined really well.

Now, at this point, I can get rid of my whisk.

What I'm gonna do is actually get it together

with a rubber spatula.

So one of the rules of thumb that I follow

whenever I'm mixing a batter like this

is I try not to overmix.

For the most part, this batter has tons of fat in it.

It has lots of cocoa powder in it,

and to overmix it would be really hard,

but we also don't wanna activate that gluten

and make these tough.

So you wanna get it till it's just smooth

and there's no lumps,

and then you're good to go.

It comes together really nice, and it looks super silky,

and that's pretty much all you want.

Make sure you scrape down to the bottom,

scrape the sides,

and then we can go into the pan,

and if this is free-flowing enough

that it doesn't really need

to be smoothed out all that much,

you can just basically try to get it into the corners.

Don't go too crazy knocking any of the bubbles out.

Now, I can put my chocolate chips on, right?

And I try and sprinkle them evenly,

and I get to the edges,

and I get into the corners,

because there's nothing worse than getting a corner piece

or an edge piece that doesn't have chocolate chips.

So be generous.

Not just piling 'em in the center.

So now, all we have to do is bake 'em.

These are gonna go into a preheated 350 degree oven

for about 20 minutes.

Now, I say about because you want to look at the brownies.

If you give them a little wiggle

and they have just a little bit of shake in the middle,

that's when you wanna take 'em out.

Because believe it or not,

when you take things out of the oven, they carryover.

They continue to cook for about three to five minutes.

So if you have a little bit of wiggle, take them out.

They'll finish cooking out of the oven,

and you'll have a perfectly fudgy result.

[upbeat music]

All right, these look really good.

You can see, if you give it a little shake,

you see these little shimmy,

a little wiggle.

That's what I want.

Test your brownies before you take them out.

You want it to be a little dirty, not liquidy.

If it's still liquid

when you poke it in the center with your knife

or your toothpick,

it's underdone,

and they're gonna be batter in the tray.

So let them get to the point where they start

to just rise a little,

and the knife of the toothpick comes out,

so it's a little dirty, not liquidy.

If it comes out super clean,

I kind of feel like brownies are overcooked.

Maybe with cake, it might be okay,

but with brownies,

you want it to come out a little on the dirty side.

Make sure you're letting it sit

until it's completely cool, right?

It shouldn't be warm at all.

It should be completely cool

before you start cutting into it.

They've been sitting,

and they've formed up really perfect.

There's no like really dome in the center

where it got cakey.

They're gonna be really nice and fudgy.

Okay, it's time to come out.

I'm gonna just kind of go nice and easy

because I don't want it to break.

Make sure that it's loosened from the sides,

and I can lift it out nice and easy, right?

So get rid of that with the old elbow,

and you can see my brownie.

Because we took the time to put

that parchment on there,

and butter it up,

it comes out in one really nice piece.

So a lot of times, you see brownies come out

with a crinkly, shiny top,

and people see that as a hallmark of a good brownie.

Now, I've had brownies with crinkly, shiny tops.

They're absolutely awful, right?

I've had boxed brownies that have a crinkly, shiny top.

It is not the hallmark of a good brownie.

The hallmark of a good brownie is how it tastes, right?

So if you don't get that shiny, crinkly top,

don't stress out.

It's still gonna be delicious.

That is not the only thing that says what a good brownie is.

I like generous-sized brownies.

I'm just gonna go in thirds here,

and then nice, big, beautiful brownies,

and then we can put them on a plate.

But I want you to just see the inside there.

It's moist, right?

You can see that it's not like cakey,

and really, like, thick.

Usually if you get a cakey brownie,

it's gonna be big and puffy, but look at that.

You can see that the chocolate chips are melty

and not super firm,

and here we have my perfectly-baked, fudgy,

chewy, gooey brownies.

It is time to taste.

First of all, I've gotta point out,

look how rich and dense these are.

They have those chocolate chips on top.

Okay, okay, stop talking.

Mm!

A lot of times, you get a brownie that does not deliver,

and it looks really dark.

It doesn't taste chocolatey.

But this thing is like a chocolate bomb.

It's absolutely delicious.

The chips on top offset the sweetness of the brownie itself.

The texture is amazing.

This is like the perfect brownie.

Taking the time to do these from scratch

and choosing the best-quality ingredients

you can get your hands on will always make these

the best brownies you ever had.

I got fudgy fingers.

[Frank laughing]

Edward Fudgyfingers.