Supernatural Brownies

The NYTimes recipe for supernatural brownies is the best brownie recipe I have ever tried. They remind me of a cakier, less dense miles of chocolate. They really are better the day after you bake them, and there are so few ingredients that the quality of your ingredients makes a significant difference.  Click here to go to the recipe.

I was recently reading somewhere, I believe in America's Test Kitchen cookbook that Jacques Pepin claimed that chocolate tastes better when it is not heated to as high of a temperature when it is cooked. And, America's Test Kitchen did some research, and he is right. This seems fairly obvious if you eat one of these brownies right out of the oven. 

I was surprised to find something that really does taste better if it cools--usually I gobble up everything when it is still so hot that I have to leave my mouth open and breathe for the first thirty seconds. The chocolate loses its flavor when it is really hot but when it cools, the brownies sink slightly and the chocolate flavor intensifies. This makes me really worried about chocolate souffles. I love chocolate souffles, but there is no way to serve them any way except for very hot. Have I, all this time, loved a sub-par chocolate dessert? I have been worried that I have just been romanticizing them--there is something so nice about eating a nice puffed up chocolate souffle full of creme anglaise. 

Clancy and I used to make them every Sunday when Margaret was a baby and we lived in Lawrence. I would make the souffles, and he would make the creme anglaise. And then we would sit at our kitchen table and hold the baby and look at how cold it was outside and eat them (two each).

Anyway, back to the brownies--I made them twice in one week. The first time I used good quality, but not excellent semi sweet chocolate along with nestle semi sweet chocolate chips and regular light brown sugar. Yesterday, I used Scharffen Berger chocolate and muscovado sugar, as recommended by the NYT, and they were better (I didn't think they could get any better, but seriously they did).

And, please do cover them, I was too lazy to return to the kitchen last night and cover them, and they got slightly stale at the edges, although they retained their moist dense centers.

P.S. You can just cut them in the pan right after you bake them, you need not follow the slightly odd saran wrap-cutting board instructions.