My favorite recipe.
I don’t recall where I read this, but I do distinctly recall reading it - white sugar gives you the crackly, glossy crust, turbinado (or natural or anything with some molasses) does not.
This proved true when I made them over and over, so I now I stock regular white sugar just for baking.
Actually I just looked at that bake-off, and my brownies from Alice Medrich’s recipe don’t look like hers at all - they look like several of the others (Tartine, Baked, Bravetart, etc) with glossy, crackly tops.
–
When you say it was “okay” - aside from the crust, what didn’t you like?
If you have a brownie type you enjoy, it may just be about picking the right recipe for that type of result. This one is fudgy not cakey, with deep chocolate flavor from the cocoa.
My adjustments: a bit of baking powder to lighten the texture just slightly, rounding down the butter to 8T (which is 1 U.S. stick, rather than the 10T called for, because it annoys me to cut into another stick), and chocolate chips mixed in (old college habit).
