Search Results for: brioche

Joe, I don’t like white bread. Yes you do. If you like bread, you like white bread. You might not like it when it’s pre-sliced and sold in plastic bags at the supermarket, but you like it in other shapes and circumstances, I’ll bet you money. If you like baguettes, focaccia, pita bread, fougasse, bagels, brioche, flour tortillas, naan, bialys, pretzels, pizza, pancakes, matzoh, ciabatta, sourdough bread, English muffins, olive bread, chapati, challah, lavash, breadsticks or dinners rolls, you like white bread. In fact if you prefer wheat or rye I’d still argue that you like white bread, because if that loaf is at all light and fluffy, it’s probably made with a least 50% white flour.

Oh yes, mine needs a workout, kids. And some nice soul-baking will be a breath of fresh air after so much fussing with cannelés (though as I said, that project is continuing). We’ll do some pain de mie, sausage in brioche…who knows what I’ll get up to. Because comfort, friends, is what I need.

Oh there’s quite a lot of difference, reader Melanie. Wax paper is basically tissue paper with a wax coating applied to the outside. It’s nowhere near as tough and useful as parchment. Parchment is a thick (or at any rate thick-er) paper that’s been passed through an acid bath to increase its rigidity and give it a hard, smooth, glossy surface that resists just about everything. Most of the time parchment is also coated with silicone to give it extra stick-resistance.

Some say she’s the one who brought much of the viennoiserie to Paris. It’s a convenient explanation since she was Austrian and something of a culture maven (as long as it was Austrian culture). I confess that while I’m familiar with the arguments in Jim Chevallier’s book on August Zang, I’m not familiar with much documentation on Marie Antoinette’s contributions to French baking, though it’s probable there were at least some. I invite anyone who’s familiar with the subject to weigh in.

On a related note, reader Paul wants to know if there’s any truth to the notion that when Marie Antoinette said “let them eat cake” what she really said was “let them eat brioche.” In fact I’ve written on that. You can find the post right here.

Who bakes that? The boulanger or the pâtissier? An excellent question, reader Tom! The viennoiserie, loosely translated as the “stuff from Vienna”, is the portion of the French baking canon that hails from the former Austrian empire. Most people are quite surprised to discover all that’s in it, the stereotypically French items that it turns out aren’t really French at all: croissants, brioche, pain au chocolat, the list goes on.

The products of the viennoiserie all share certain characteristics. First they’re all made, at least classically, from fine white wheat flour. Second, packaged yeast cultures are critical ingredients (“brewer’s” yeast back in the day, granulated yeast products today). These concentrated yeast populations — which you could never achieve via natural “starter” cultures — create a quick rise and by extension the fluffy, light and/or crispy textures that are synonymous with “Vienna” breads. Lastly they are rich. The Viennese have never been content to leave bread alone. They add milk. They add eggs. They add butter. And the results speak for themselves: wow.

Where does brioche Polonaise come from? Not Poland, at least I haven’t found any reference to Poland in my research so far. Brioche Polonaise is a Parisian sweetmeat, perhaps a take on a Polish-style cake, probably invented in the mid-to-late 1800’s, about the time that the fluted brioche mold became popular. Today it’s something of a staple of the Parisian pâtissier’s repertoire, though it’s little known in the States.

What makes brioche Polonaise so remarkable is not its name or its origin, but the fact that it’s a product of both the boulangerie (bakery) and the pâtisserie (pastry shop).

Laminated pastry makers get hung up on numbers: 243, 729, 2187…the big multiples of three that you get when you fold a three-layer dough-butter-dough packet many times (2187 is the result of six letter-style tri-folds or “turns”). All those layers are what give laminated doughs their texture. Generally speaking the more layers you have in the dough the lighter, flakier and crunchier the finished product will be. Puff pastry has the most layers: 729 (5 turns) or 2187 (6 turns), croissant dough usually has the least: 81 (3 turns) or 108 (2 tri-fold turns plus one 4-ply “book” turn).

Kringle dough generally doesn’t appear in most laminated dough taxonomies since it’s the product of a mere two letter-style turns, which gives it only 27 layers. When the dough is baked up you scarcely know it’s laminated at all. The texture of the crumb is somewhere between a croissant and an enriched yeast dough (like brioche). This is what makes it unique, and also rather sneaky. You might call it semi-laminated.