"brioche" news and stories

Nutella brioche pudding. Photo: No Recipes.

Sweet bread pudding tends to be delicious, and this one looks to be no exception -- a fair assumption considering it's made with bananas, milk, cream, eggs, Nutella -- Nutella! -- and not just any old bread, but brioche. But what if we said it also smelled like roses? Marc from No Recipes added three tablespoons of rose water to the recipe because ... why not?

Though he pulled this bread pudding together from scraps in his kitchen, Marc writes that the result was "swaths of buttery brioche crust enrobed in a fragrant chocolaty custard, holding bits of tender sweet fruit in its folds." We couldn't have said it better ourselves -- unless, of course, we'd had a chance to taste it.

[Via No Recipes]

Brioche burger buns. Photo: Smitten Kitchen.

Marie Antoinette may not have been the one to say "Let them eat cake!" -- we'll never know for sure -- but one thing is certain: whoever said it first wasn't talking about the sugary stuff, but about bread. The phrase is translated from the French qu'ils mangent de la brioche. If said brioche is baked to a perfect golden brown and topped with sesame seeds, we say, "Oui!"

Just in time for Bastille Day, here is an ideal-looking hamburger bun from across the pond. The American treat was given a French twist by Deb at the Smitten Kitchen, who consulted nearly 100 recipes in search of the ultimate bun. In the end, she went with a technique that ran in the New York Times; the buns turned out "plush and mildly sweet and slightly buttery."

Suffice it to say we're feeling fully fired up for Bastille Day. Bon appetit!

[Via Smitten Kitchen]

I have posted about brioche before, but I've found a new recipe for the most tender and delicious bread you'll ever eat. It is more than worth your time. The recipe is the one the 2005 US Bread Team used in the 2005 Bread World Cup (I got a copy because I'm a member of the Bread Bakers Guild of America). They used this dough as a base for a strawberry danish-like confection, but I chose it because I needed a nice loaf to put on the brunch buffet at work.

This brioche is a little different from others I've come across, in that it uses a short dough along with the butter to keep the gluten nice and undeveloped. While the short dough does make the flour content a little higher, it also ups the butter ratio. The sugar content is raised as well, but is still only about 8% from the dough.

This design is easy to do, just divide your dough into four pieces, roll each one into a ball, and place them in the loaf pan. As the dough rises, it smooshes together and bakes up just as you see in the picture above. Check out the gallery below for some more images. The recipe is after the jump.

Brioche is one of the original enriched breads. Enriched meaning that it contains lots of butter and eggs. According to Wikipedia, there was mention of brioche in print as early as the 13th century, though it's believed to be the descendant of a type of Roman bread.

The that quote usually attributed to Marie Antoinette about letting the peasants eat cake, many people think it was actually mistranslated and refers to brioche. She was saying to let the peasants eat brioche. According to Peter Reinhart, in his Bread Bakers Apprentice, there was two versions of brioche during that time in France. One of them was for the rich, which was chock full of butter, and one was for the poor, which had minimal amounts of butter. There were apparently strict rules governing who could buy which version. By saying "let them eat brioche" Marie Antoinette was saying let the poor eat the rich person's version of the bread.

Brioche is an amazingly rich, soft, flaky, delicious bread. It's kind of strange in that it contains so much butter, but it still turns out bread-like. In fact, brioche can have anywhere from 50% to 90% butter (that would be half as much butter as flour to almost as much butter as flour by weight). The most traditional and recognizable form of brioche is the brioche à tête (pictured above), but you can shape it any way you want.

Brioche makes a great brunch bread just because it's so buttery and tasty. I recently found a great formula for strawberry almond brioche from Cyril Hitz, a very well known baker. You can check out my version after the jump.

I've never made brioche. I've spent some time looking at the molds at Fante's (although I've never been able to justify the purchase) and I always enjoyed the bread when it's entered my life fully baked. But it's just one of those things I haven't attempted on my own. Given my tendency to become addicted to bread products, I do believe that if I started with brioche, I wouldn't be able to stop.

I do admire the attempts of others to make this noble, egg-y bread and the Tooknap Press has made some really cool examples of this delicious treat, including the mushroom shaped loaf you see above. I would like a bite right now.

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