Brioche is truly amazing stuff. Sticky buns are really just the beginning of what this dough can do. In fact it’s amazing all by itself, which is why I think it would be worthwhile to stay on it for another week, and prepare it in one of its more classic forms: brioche à tête. Tête […]
READ ONI’m a broken record on this but I’ll say it again: any time you’re gearing up for a butter-intensive project, pay up for some of the good Euro stuff. It’ll be double the price of your garden-variety unsalted, but the taste — especially in something like a brioche where there are no other competing flavors […]
READ ONSeems I can’t even say the word “brioche” without the New York Times jumping on the bandwagon. This week’s food section has an article (and accompanying recipe) extolling the virtues of morel mushrooms, specifically when consumed on toasted brioche. It actually sounds delicious.
READ ONThough you wouldn’t think it were possible to ascribe sticky buns to the ancient Greeks, Romans and Egyptians, some food historians in fact do. It’s yet another example of food researchers gone wild, since those cultures had nothing like our brioche doughs, cane sugar and butter. All of them did have yeast-raised dough, however, so […]
READ ONA brioche by any other name…would still make a hell of a breakfast. Though I do wonder exactly when brioche as we now know it first come into being. The only thing that can be said definitively about brioche is that the current eggy, buttery version is a recent development, perhaps 200 years old at […]
READ ONAs I mentioned yesterday, the utility of brioche dough goes far beyond the standard muffin-with-a-topknot mini-bread you might have for breakfast at your local pastry shop (though that’s pretty darned fabulous). Most of the time brioche is baked into much larger loaves, sometimes in an extra-large brioche mold, but most often in a standard loaf […]
READ ONBut then non-wheat substances aren’t the only way to “shorten” a dough. You can also do it with fat, which coats the ends of gluten molecules, keeping them from bonding to one another. This is the science behind what are known as “short crusts” and “short breads”, and where we in America get the word […]
READ ONEvery so often a special type of person comes along, a visionary you might say, a dreamer, who sees the world not for what it is, but for what it could be. Whose vision for the world, while it isn’t heaven, nudges us just a little closer to it. One of those people is French […]
READ ONI saw these on an episode of Good Eats this week and was intrigued. Also, my wife’s colleagues have been complaining that I’ve been ignoring them lately. These individual, portable pastries should get me back in their good graces: Pocket Pies And since I’ve barely begun to scratch the merest surface of this bread, I […]
READ ONContrary to what I insinuated in one of yesterday’s posts, I was discerning in my choice of this week’s recipes. For the brioche in particular, I wanted a recipe that employed a sponge as opposed to a plain vanilla straight dough method. The reason, because I really do value that extra bit of depth that […]
READ ON