Now let’s cook
Brownie. The chocolate stays, and today there is zhent inside: roasted millet with sugar and butter.
Ingredients
- 250 g dark chocolateplain, in a bar, with no filling or flavourings, for melting
- 250 g buttermade from cow’s milk
- 4 eggslarge hen’s egg, about 50 g without the shell
- 280 g sugarwhite granulated sugar
- 120 g plain wheat flourwhite wheat flour, called all-purpose in the US
- 30 g cocoa powderunsweetened, sifted into the batter together with the flour
- 200 g zhenta Kazakh sweet: toasted millet ground with sugar and pressed with butter
Method
Heat the oven to 200 °C and line a 23 cm square tin with baking paper. Cube the butter, break up the chocolate and put both in a heatproof bowl.
Set the bowl over a pan of gently simmering water, its base clear of the water. Once the chocolate and butter have melted, lift the bowl off, stir to a smooth, glossy sauce and let it cool to room temperature.
In a large bowl, beat the eggs with the sugar using an electric mixer for about 3 minutes, until pale and thick: the beaters should leave a trail on the surface.
Pour in the cooled chocolate and fold it through gently with a spatula so the mixture keeps its air.
Sift the flour and cocoa together into the bowl and fold them in carefully until no dry lumps remain.
Break the zhent into pieces of about 2 cm and fold them into the batter in a few strokes. Scrape the batter into the tin and level the top.
Bake for 25 minutes, then push a toothpick into the middle of the brownie where there is no zhent. It should come out with moist crumbs but no liquid batter. If the batter is liquid, bake for 5 minutes more and test again.
Check the middle with a thermometer: it should read at least 74 °C. If it reads lower, keep baking and check every 5 minutes.
Leave the brownie in the tin for at least 30 minutes, then lift it out on the paper and cut it into 16 pieces.
