Brioche: The Butter Bomb (BBA Challenge #4)

On Friday I delved back into the Bread Baker’s Apprentice Challenge. I’ve barely been keeping up. Last week’s challenge was brioche, a classic enriched French bread. If this recipe for Paula Deen’s Fried Butter Balls appeals to you, then you may like brioche.

The recipe can be found in Peter Reinhart’s “Bread Baker’s Apprentice” starting on page 125. Upon looking at the recipe, my heart clenched in sympathetic pre-cardiact arrest warning. The ratio of butter is around 40-50% for the “Middle Class” and “Rich Man’s” Brioche and the majority of the liquid in the dough comes from whole milk with a bit more from the five whole eggs. I immediately thought of the episode of Paula Deen’s show where a group of muscle-bound “Butter Wranglers” brought out a bust of her that had been sculpted in butter.

Paula and the Butter Boys at PoeTV

From the very beginning, I just really wasn’t into this bread, and it showed in how sloppy my work was. I forgot to take my butter and milk out ahead of time and added both to the dough cold from the back of the fridge. In the case of the butter, this was probably a good thing but it meant that my sponge took an extra 20 minutes to become bubbly and foamy. Due to the way Reinhart lays out his recipe, giving the main instructions once, and then breaking down different proportions for the “Rich Man’s” and “Middle Class” Brioche, I actually ended up using a bit too much flour for the amount of butter I was using.

Whenever you are working with a buttery dough, time and temperature are not on your side. It’s summer here, and even with the A/C running the house is 80F. Once you get your hands on the dough the clock starts ticking before it starts to melt into a sticky, gooey mass that won’t hold its shape at all. Thankfully the method I chose for shaping my brioche was simple: divide into equal portions, roll into balls, then use one finger to almost divide the dough by rolling a “neck” so that there is a large ball and a smaller one that will nest on top. It actually ends up looking a little like Gleep from Hannah-Barbera’s “The Herculoids.” I admit, I was tempted to put on a couple of seeds for eyes.

Once you have all of the brioche shaped, they rise in their special pans until they’ve nearly doubled in size. If you are lucky, they don’t become indistinct blobs and the tops don’t roll off to one side. IF you’re lucky. Others have taken the easier route and simply made loaves of brioche or turned them into monkey bread.

Overall, I was utterly underwhelmed by brioche. The flavor isn’t too much different, to me, than a biscuit with a LOT of butter, sort of like those canned biscuits you can buy with the extra butter baked right in. I was so absolutely underwhelmed, in fact, that I only baked half of my dough the first time through and forgot to take pictures, so I had to bake the rest today so I could post! If I’m going to have something with this much butter in it, give me a croissant.

Nutritional Info for Peter Reinhart’s petites brioches a téte (24 per batch)
Calories: 158, Fat: 9g Carbohydrate: 15g Fiber: .5g Cholesterol: 62mg