Alton Brown's Tip For Better-Tasting Nuts In Homemade Brownies

Baked goods with nuts can be delicious if you are a nut fan. As MyRecipes explains, whether you like them toasted or raw, nuts add a lovely crunchy element to your chocolate chip cookies, your walnut and pecan pies, your classic hummingbird pie, and a laundry list of sweet treats that can satisfy the sweetest of sweet tooths. But as Epicurious points out, when it comes to those homemade ultimate fudgy brownies with nuts, people have some strong opinions with a line of division clearly drawn in the culinary sand.

Brownies are all kinds of chocolatey goodness, and despite the chitter-chatter on Epicurious, MasterClass says the flavor of these cake-like treats can be enhanced by adding nuts, especially if they are toasted. Ree Drummond shares on Pioneer Woman that toasting nuts is easy and it helps them to release the oils that make them taste even nuttier — and Alton Brown concurs. Only the "Good Eats" host goes a step further.

Per Food52, Brown says you don't just want to toast your nuts for your brownies — you want to fry them.

Food52 shares that in his book, "EveryDayCook," Alton Brown reveals you just don't want to toast nuts for your brownies, you want to fry them in butter or oil for five to seven minutes before adding them to the chocolate batter. When they are done, the nutty flavor is intensified by that of the butter, making them the perfect addition to your brownies made from scratch or a mix.

Per a Youtube video, Brown also fries his peanuts in a wok when he makes his peanut butter. He says frying nuts brings out even more of the "toasty flavors and aromas," and don't be too hasty to get rid of the oil you fried them in because you can repurpose it. Brown explains that as you fry your nuts in the wok, you want them to turn a "deep, golden brown," but in order to do so, you must keep them moving and swirling them around to avoid winding up with a burnt mess. 

King Arthur Baking notes that when working with raw nuts in a frying pan, you should expect the outside of your nuts to caramelize, leaving you with an out-of-this-world-tasting end product.