I’ve wanted to make brioche for quite some time now, however, all the recipes in my cookbooks advocate using a mixer due to the extreme softness of the dough. So, I put off attempting it. Now, with the advent of my gorgeous KitchenAid mixer I was eager to give it a go.

After comparing recipes from almost every cookbook I owned, I decided to make Peter Reinhart’s “Rich Man’s Brioche” from “The Breadmaker’s Apprentice”. I’d received the book for Christmas and while I’d drooled a lot over the recipes, I hadn’t baked anything from it yet. It seemed like a good idea to try a new recipe with my new mixer!

Reinhart gives three recipes for Brioche – Rich Man’s, Middle-Class, and Poor Man’s. All have varying levels of butter. I was feeling brave, so chose to make Rich Man’s despite knowing that the dough would be hard to handle.

The only criticism I have of Reinhart’s book is that the measurements are given in cups and ounces. It would surely have been more sensible to have given cups and metric, no? He does, however, give bakers percentages for each recipe, so you can scale measurements up and down quite happily. This will no doubt come in handy as we sometimes fail to get through all the bread I churn out.

In the KitchenAid bowl, I creamed together 28g fresh yeast (Reinhart prefers to use instant yeast – I had fresh so used that instead. Instant would be 9.24g) with 112g tepid full-fat milk. I added 63g bread flour and mixed that in throughly before covering with clingfilm and leaving for 20 minutes until the sponge had risen nicely and fell back when I rapped on the bowl. While the sponge was rising, I chopped up all the butter into small dice and spread it out over a large plate. I’m very bad at remembering to set butter out to soften, so I often find myself chopping and squishing it for recipes.

Using the paddle attachment on the KitchenAid (as instructed in the recipe), I slowly added five large eggs to the sponge whilst I watched with glee as the machine did all the work for me. I’d already stirred together in another bowl the flour (448g), granulated sugar (35g) and fine sea salt (10g) so I slowly added this in and mixed for about two minutes on low speed. This is the life! Standing around just watching something else do all the work! After all the flour had been incorporated (hydrated, if you want to be technical) I turned off the KitchenAid and let the mixture sit for five minutes to develop the gluten and relax.

I then bashed away at the butter some more to ensure that it really was softened and then gave it a quick burst in the microwave to be really sure. I then took the brave step of starting to incorporate it into the mixture. Well, the KitchenAid took the brave step, I just chucked it into the bowl in four stages and increased the speed slightly. Reinhart advised that the mixture would cling to the bowl and indeed it did. As more butter was added it started to form a ball around the paddle. I contemplated changing to the dough hook, but decided against it as I knew he’d tested the recipe in a KitchenAid. I scraped the dough down from the bowl and the paddle and mixed for an extra six minutes until the dough was very well mixed and very soft.

I put the dough into an oiled dish and covered it with clingfilm before chilling overnight. The dough only rose slightly and I wasn’t sure at first whether the yeast was still alive or not. When Deb made brioche, albeit to a different recipe, her dough attempted to take over the fridge! Later on, I realised that the fridge was perhaps a tad too cold. My tropical juice mix had turned to slush – I suspect my brioche dough had a lucky escape from disaster.

I opted to make petites brioches a tete and a medium sized brioche parisienne. As I don’t own the special fluted tins, I used a 12-muffin tin as suggested by Gordon Ramsay. I thoroughly buttered the muffin tin and also a loaf tin and decided to make the loaf first to get a feel for the dough before doing anything more fiddly than making boules.

I divided the chilled dough in half, and put the remainder back into the fridge. After dusting some flour over the dough and the worktop, I then divided it further into three portions. Each portion was rolled and pulled into a boule shape and I discovered that the dough wasn’t too hard to work with. It did get sticky, but only if it was worked slowly. The key here seemed to be speed. I placed the three boules side by side in the loaf tin, covered with clingfilm and set aside to rise. I have to confess that I actually ended up transferring the boules to a smaller tin after an hour. Whilst they had risen, it was apparent that I had made them too small to fill the pan properly. I expected this to be quite difficult to do but due to the copious amount of butter I used when greasing, the boules just slid out neatly. They looked much happier in the smaller tin. I added some egg wash at this point.

Onto the petites brioches a tete. I divided the remaining dough into 12 roughly 50g portions, rolled them into neat balls and chilled them down again so that they could recover from handling. Reinhart gave two methods for shaping the brioches, one was very complicated and even with pictures I still felt at a loss, the other seemed much more simple. Using the edge of your hand, roll the ball of dough so that it forms a large ball and a small ball. You shouldn’t divide the dough. This was quite easy, so I then popped the very odd looking dough into a muffin hole and pushed down the small ball on top with my fingertips until it looked like it should. I then egg washed them all and covered with clingfilm to prove.

Alas, I let the small brioches overproove and thus they lost their little heads. I thought about trying to reshape the heads, but decided I would probably just poke all the air out of them. I hurriedly put the muffin tray into the oven and baked the brioches for 17 minutes before turning them out onto a rack. They looked fantastic. Due to baking in a muffin tray rather than proper fluted brioche moulds, they weren’t the prettiest brioche around and I must admit that none of the heads survived the ovenspring…. but still, they looked as if they would taste rather good! The Parisenne loaf had risen to fill the tin by the time the small brioches were done, so I baked that for 35 minutes. It came out slightly too dark on top, so next time I would give it 30 minutes and egg-wash it very lightly (it received two coats due to being transferred to a new tin).

Once cooled, the taste was absolutely amazing. A delicious, slightly flaky exterior with a soft, moist, sweet crumb inside. And so, so buttery. I’m worried that I may be developing an addiction to butter. Ah well, I’ll go for a long walk. I plan on freezing some of the small brioches a tetes and pulling them out for weekend breakfasts. If we don’t finish the Parisienne loaf, then I’ll turn it into bread pudding later this week. Gordon Ramsay has an utterly luscious sounding recipe in his Dessert book – Bread Pudding laced with Baileys.

Rich Man’s Brioche from “The Breadmaker’s Apprentice”

SPONGE
2.25oz (63g) unbleached bread flour
.33oz (9.24g) instant yeast (I substituted 28g fresh yeast)
4oz (112g) whole milk, lukewarm

DOUGH
5 large eggs, slightly beaten
16oz (448g) unbleached bread flour
1.25oz (35g) granulated sugar
.38oz (10.64g) salt
16oz (448g) unsalted butter, at room temperatre
1 egg, whisked until frothy, for egg wash.