No. 3413

Bread with Butter, Varsovian

Pain au Beurre a la Varsovienne

Make a small leaven with four ounces of flour, half an ounce of yeast and sufficient warm milk to form it into a softish paste; mold it into a ball, lay in a vessel, dredge with flour, cover with a cloth and leave it in a mild temperature to raise the leaven to double its size. Sift three-quarters of a pound of flour on the table, form a hollow in the center and in it put a pinch of salt, five ounces of melted butter and half a gill of milk; make the dough of the same consistency as a brioche paste; incorporate the leaven, cutting it up to mix it well with the paste without kneading it. Lay this paste in a vessel, dredge with flour, cover with a cloth and leave it to rise in a mid temperature. Turn it over on the table when it attains twice its original size; cut it up and divide it into pieces; with each of these form a ball an inch and a half in diameter; range them on buttered baking sheets at a distance of an inch and a quarter apart and let rise to double their size; brush over with egg diluted with milk and bake in a moderate oven.

← No. 3412 The Dough Bakery & Breads No. 3414 Crescents with Butter—Fine →

For the Modern Kitchen

An enriched brioche-style roll built on a preferment, from Ranhofer's The Epicurean. The instructions assume a baker who already knows brioche, so the details worth pinning down are the weights, the yeast, and the fact that the leaven is cut in rather than kneaded.

The hinge: cut the leaven in, don't knead itThe recipe says to incorporate the risen leaven by "cutting it up to mix it well with the paste without kneading it," i.e. chopped through the butter dough until evenly distributed rather than worked with the heel of the hand. The point appears to be to avoid working the fat and the already-risen leaven any harder than necessary.
WeightsLeaven: 4 oz (115 g) flour, 1/2 oz (14 g) fresh yeast, warm milk to a soft paste. Dough: 12 oz (340 g) flour, 5 oz (140 g, 10 tbsp) melted butter, half a gill of milk (1/4 cup / 60 ml), a pinch of salt.
Yeast substitutionHalf an ounce of compressed yeast is roughly 1 1/2 teaspoons of instant dry yeast. That is a generous amount by modern standards, in keeping with a heavily buttered dough that ferments slowly; in a warm room the leaven may double in around an hour.
"Half a gill"A gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 1/4 cup. Treat it as a starting point rather than a fixed quantity, since the milk absorbed by the leaven is not measured at all and flour absorption varies.
Consistency of a brioche pasteSoft, slack and slightly sticky, holding a shape but not stiff. If the dough is dry enough to knead comfortably, add milk a spoonful at a time.
Rising temperature"A mild temperature" is probably somewhere around 75-80F. With this much butter, a very warm proof risks leaking fat and a cold one stalls. Allow an hour or more for each rise, and note that the recipe wants the shaped balls doubled before they are glazed.
OvenA moderate oven is 350-375F. Rolls of this size bake in 12 to 16 minutes; they are done when deep gold and sounding hollow underneath.
YieldBalls an inch and a half across weigh roughly an ounce apiece, so the batch gives about two dozen small rolls. Spaced only an inch and a quarter apart, they are likely to touch as they proof.
GlazeOne egg beaten with a tablespoon of milk is ample for the batch. Brush lightly; a heavy egg wash pools between the rolls and scorches before the crumb is set.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer compiled The Epicurean (1894) out of some thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its bakery section is essentially a French professional repertoire transcribed for American use. "A la Varsovienne" means Warsaw-style, one of a long list of nineteenth-century French kitchen tags naming European capitals and courts; French chefs worked extensively in Poland and Russia through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and such names generally point to that traffic rather than to any documented Polish original. What actually distinguishes the roll is its structure: a small yeasted leaven raised separately and then cut into a rich butter dough, a method that predates reliable commercial yeast. Ranhofer places it among the brioches and crescents, the small breakfast breads a professional bakeshop turned out fresh each morning.