8/21/2010 - Brioche

My mother has been telling me that this project is going to make us all fat because of the bad carbs. While I have no intention of jumping on the carbs-are-bad bandwagon, she may have a point when it comes to brioche. PR gives three variations on brioche: Poor Man's Brioche, Middle-Class Brioche, and Rich Man's Brioche, which vary by butter content. I had a hunch that I would probably never bake brioche again, so why not go whole hog and make Rich Man's Brioche? I hesitated because Rich Man's Brioche has an entire pound of butter to 4 cups of flour. But J4 said, "Won't you always wonder?" And he was right, I would. So I took the dive.

This formula begins with a sponge of flour, yeast, and milk. After that foams for 20 minutes, five eggs are whisked in, followed by the remaining flour, sugar, and salt. The resulting dough is allowed to rest for five minutes so the gluten can develop before it is overrun with fat. Then that pound of butter is worked in by quarters. Now, I don't own a stand mixer; I mix my bread by hand. This one was a challenge. J4 actually took a couple of turns mixing the give my arm a break, the wonderful man (which I thought was fitting at the time, as he's the wonderful man who talked me into an entire POUND of butter). We eventually got it all in and spread the very soft dough onto a parchment-lined baking sheet, which sat in the fridge overnight so that the dough could firm up for shaping. I don't own fancy fluted brioche molds (J4 wanted to get some, but I have to draw the line somewhere), so I just shaped my brioche as standard rolls and left them to proof for an hour and a half. Room temperature is pretty warm at my house in the summer, and that probably did nothing good for my brioche, which spread a bit more during proofing than I would have liked. I brushed them with an egg wash, stuck them in the oven, and came back ten minutes later intending to move them apart only to find that they had spread even further to basically fill the entire pan, so I just let them bake touching.

These were so ridiculously rich. It was amazing. Well, not that amazing when you know that there was between 1/4 and 1/3 stick of butter in each roll. They were yummy and flaky, but we couldn't handle much. We each had one and were done. Even though he's normally the first to gobble up the bread on his plate, J5 barely touched his; I guess in his 22 month-old wisdom he knew what wasn't good for him. So of course I ate his in addition to mine, although I really didn't want it. We decided we weren't ready to have all that richness again the next day, so now there is a bag of brioche rolls in the freezer that we will slowly work our way through. I'm pretty sure I'll never make this again, but I suppose it's nice to not have to wonder.