And so it begins... Nigel Slater's Very Good Chocolate Brownies

Nigel Slater is one of my favourite food writers.  His books are so beautifully written, and The Kitchen Diaries is a particular favourite.  His writing is so gentle and so precise, and his palette flawless - he never over-complicates any dish.

My friend Priya is a fantastic cook.  She too is obsessed with brownies but because she's very slim I never give her enough credit for her obsession.  She's made me Nigel's brownies before and my memory of them was positive, if hazy, so I thought they'd be a good starting point for my odyssey. 

The recipe is quite straightforward - all the usual suspects, no accoutrements.  It calls for golden caster sugar, rather than regular - and has equal parts cocoa to flour.  I reduced the sugar by 10g to 290g, and upped the chocolate chip chunks from 50g to 70g (I used Waitrose cooking chocolate as I'm a sucker for the packaging.)

First, cream together the butter and sugar, if you have a blender all the better / quicker.

Melt the majority of the chocolate

Add the eggs, plus an extra yolk, to the sugar / butter combo.

Add the chocolate chunks

and the molten chocolate

then fold together with a metal spoon, along with the flour, cocoa and baking powder, plus a pinch of salt, and you're in business.  Very simple indeed.  Today's helper, the delectable Mr. Newman (no relation - although I actually think he has shades of a young Paul Newman, no?)

Thirty minutes at 180 and you're done.

I'd take them out at 28 minutes next time, based on my oven's performance - as the outer frame of the brownies was slightly overdone.


The verdict

Very very chocolatey, good, dense and crumbly.  7.5 /10.

Nigel's brownies are crumbly, deep, dark and uber-chocolatey.  They don't offer much in the way of resistance, and personally I like a brownie that puts up a bit of a fight with my teeth.  They're dense without being fudgey (I do like fudgey).  In places they are light, but when you hit a seam where a chunk of chocolate has melted, you hit full on motherlode of dark chocolate - great if you have a cup of tea or a glass of milk to hand.

The taste and depth of chocolate flavour is great, but for me the texture is too cakey.  I think this photo is mildly misleading - it looks like the brownie is supermoist, which sadly my rendition wasn't.