In the Year of Fearless Baking: Episode #4: Brioche

Friends, I have entered the strange land of enriched doughs. While baking my first loaf of sourdough bread engendered a sort of love at first sight moment for me, my experience baking brioche was decidedly different. I suspect I will be baking sourdough bread for the rest of my days, but the land of brioche is not a place in which I will be making a home for myself. Not that it wasn’t fun, fascinating, and delicious. Oh, it was.

My brioche adventure started early last week, with a quest for fresh yeast. Fresh yeast is different from instant yeast and active dry yeast- it comes in a little compressed cake and is highly perishable. Apparently it is better for enriched dough, and knowing that it may take me a few days to find it, I began pounding the pavement.

When the first few stores I stopped in at didn’t have it, I began doing what I’m sure many others have done: Online searches for “Where can I buy fresh yeast in Boston?” Going to stores listed as ‘official retailers’ on the websites of the companies that manufacture fresh yeast, only to walk away empty handed. One store I called even said they had it, but when I got there I realized that they were just selling active dry yeast in bulk, and didn’t realize that fresh yeast is something different. I am here to report back to you that as of now, February 2016, I could not find fresh yeast in the Boston metro area.

After finally coming to terms with the fact that my fresh yeast dreams would have to wait, I decided to settle for using active dry. On Friday, during a beautiful snow storm, I made the dough.

Brioche dough is totally bizarre. It is a dough that has some eggs in it, and you essentially beat the hell out of it while slowly adding soft butter, one little piece at a time. It has the most weirdo consistency- like silky, sexy marshmallow fluff which is also a rubber band. And the way it was like having its way with my mixer, I wasn’t sure if the poor machine was going to survive the ordeal. Gluten, man. It’s crazy stuff.

And I haven’t even talked about the sheer quantity of butter in a single loaf of brioche. Sheesh, it’s reason enough to not make this a habit. But not reason enough to avoid all of the other baking adventures I have lined up in the next few months. Trust me, they all feature a metric shitload of butter (yikes- I probably better start running again soon).

After spending some time rising and an overnight in the fridge, the brioche dough was ready for shaping. By that point, the gluten was much more relaxed and handling it was totally reasonable. Although I used Dorie’s recipe for the dough, I followed Martha’s shaping and baking instructions.

And, holy wow. Pulling this out of the oven was just another totally crazy mind-blowing moment. Baking this loaf made the entire house smell amazing, and I can’t believe how much it rose while baking.  

Also, what can I say? It tastes amazing, and doesn’t it look like cartoon bread? Super cool. Thank you, ancient French chefs, for another weird and incredible contribution to the field of baking.