This classic brioche is light and tender with a deep rich and buttery flavour thanks to a manual cold fermentation.
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Martha Stewart Bakes Brioche Bread 4 Ways | Martha Bakes S2E3 "Brioche"
Serious Mealtimes / Debbie Wei
Brioche is without a doubt the gold standard of enriched breads the yardstick by which all others are measured. It’s unashamedly rich with a melt-in-the-mouth quality and has a relatively soft thin crust that can be flattened without cracking. It has a firm even crumb that when baked properly can be torn into fluffy strips like cotton candy. While brioche may sound complicated or fancy it’s made with common staples: flour butter eggs salt and sugar. In fact the ratios of butter and sugar to flour are similar to those of pie dough. And like pie dough brioche is all about the butter just expressed differently. Instead of being crisp and flaky brioche is pillowy soft and tender thanks to a nearly threefold increase in hydration (about 25% for pie dough versus 70% for brioche) primarily in the form of eggs and the addition of yeast. Remove yeast from a brioche ingredient list and you could mistake the ingredient list for cake and they would be right! Brioche is the original cake; think of Marie Antoinette’s famous mistranslation of “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche!” which may or may not have said “Let them eat cake.” After all it wasn’t until the introduction of chemical leavening agents like baking soda in the mid-1800s that we began to think of cake as separate from yeast. What’s more brioche has a much lower sugar content than your average modern cake making it an incredibly versatile cake-like bread for both savory and sweet uses. It lends itself equally well to sandwiches and burgers as it does to being drenched in syrup sprinkled with chocolate chips or stirred into jam.
In the world of bread there are two basic categories: lean and enriched. Lean doughs refer to your typical sandwich bread pizza or baguette and contain little to no added sugar or fat. When a dough is enriched it means that it has been fortified with sugar eggs or fat to create different textures and flavors. From Parker House rolls to challah panettone to cinnamon rolls you’ve likely been charmed by the softer fluffier profile of enriched doughs. When you slice open a well-made loaf of brioche you’re greeted with an ultra-fine crumb. Part of this is due to the yeast fermenting the flour producing carbon dioxide bubbles that expand in the oven causing the bread to rise. The rest can be attributed to the butter. As the bread bakes the butter (which was distributed throughout the dough during the mixing process) melts and spreads around the dough leaving behind air bubbles within the gluten structure. Once cooled all the melted fat solidifies back into the crumb creating a springy yet delicate loaf. While there is no set recipe for brioche there are some commonalities we can rely on.
