The Two Salty Ingredients Trisha Yearwood Adds For Next-Level Brownies

There's nothing like a classic brownie, especially if you're a fan of chocolate. To make the decadent dessert, all you need is melted chocolate or cocoa powder, plus the basic baking combo of flour, butter, eggs, sugar, and baking powder. There's already plenty of fudgy, chocolatey goodness baked into a brownie, but there's no reason you can't spruce it up with a few extra ingredients.

If you want to intensify the chocolate, there's always the option of mixing some chocolate chips into the batter, and if you want to add a layer of a different flavor, try peanut butter or chopped nuts. Some people put frosting on top or dust it with powdered sugar, but country-music-star-turned-celebrity-chef Trisha Yearwood has a more unconventional approach to changing up her brownie recipe. In her cookbook "Trisha's Kitchen," Yearwood shared that she adds not one, but two, salty ingredients to her brownies, and the results look surprisingly delicious.

Trisha Yearwood's cookbooks are filled primarily with the traditional Southern recipes she grew up eating, but her brownie recipe is not one of them. Instead, as she revealed on a cooking segment on "The Today Show," the recipe popped into her head one night before going to bed. In addition to chocolate chips, Yearwood also decided to add bacon and potato chips to her brownies, and it ended up being delicious enough to publish in her cookbook.

Yearwood isn't the first to use bacon or potato chips in a dessert, but unlike most other recipes, hers calls for not only adding them as a topping but also mixing them straight into the batter. Yearwood also utilizes the cooked bacon's grease in place of a portion of the butter to really amp up the bacon flavor. And when it comes to the potato chips, she insists on using the kind with the ridges so the batter adheres to it more effectively.

If you like chocolate-covered pretzels, there's a good chance you'll also like Trisha Yearwood's brownies. The proof is in the science — salty and sweet foods are naturally compatible for two main reasons. The main one is that salt's flavor-enhancing properties are activated by the presence of sugar. In fact, certain taste receptors only work if salt is detected. It's also a biological instinct to crave salt and sugar together. We crave sugar because it's a source of energy, and we crave salt at the same time because our body is constantly excreting sodium and therefore needs to replenish it.

If it's chocolate specifically that's the source of sugar, salt reacts with it in another way. In addition to enhancing flavors, it also counteracts bitterness. When the salt taste buds on the tongue get activated, something called cross-modal perception occurs. This essentially dulls the taste of bitterness in the chocolate and intensifies the taste of other flavors. What this basically means is that the best way to enjoy brownies or anything chocolatey is to eat it with something salty like potato chips or bacon.