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Brioche Fluttes
Brioche fluttes are prepared and baked same as small brioches, but rolling out parts in flute shape instead of round shape.
This is a shaping note rather than a standalone formula: it assumes you already have the book's small brioche dough in hand. What follows is what the terse instruction leaves unsaid.
- You need the base recipeNothing here tells you the dough. Use the small brioche recipe this entry points back to, or any standard rich brioche: roughly 4 cups flour, 4-5 eggs, 1 cup butter, 2-3 tablespoons sugar, 2 teaspoons salt, milk and yeast to bind. The only difference in the finished item is the shape.
- What a flute shape meansA flûte is a slim, tapered length — think of a miniature baguette rather than a ball. Roll each portion of dough under the palms from the centre outward so the ends draw to points.
- Chill before shapingRich brioche dough is unworkable warm. Refrigerate it several hours or overnight; cold dough rolls into a clean taper, warm dough smears and leaks butter.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives none here. A hot oven, around 400-425F, suits small brioche; small flutes bake fast, 12-18 minutes depending on thickness, and are done when deep brown and hollow-sounding.
- Egg wash and slashingEgg wash -- Brush with beaten egg thinned with a spoonful of milk just before baking.
- Proof timeThe book gives none. Expect 1 to 2 hours at room temperature after shaping, until the flutes look puffed and slack but not collapsed; enriched doughs rise slowly and cold dough slower still.
- YieldA batch built on 4 cups of flour gives about 18 to 24 flutes at 2 ounces of dough each. Brioche is best the day it is baked — serve the same day or freeze once cool.
Brioche is the French kitchen's standing example of a dough enriched past the point of bread: flour, yeast, eggs and a great deal of butter, worked cold and baked fast. The classic form is the brioche à tête, the fluted mold with its topknot, but bakers have long run the same dough out into other shapes — rings, braids, and the slim tapered flûte, whose name means flute and refers to the long thin loaf, the same sense preserved in the modern flûte of Parisian bread. Entries like this one are a reminder of how professional cookbooks were often organised: a master preparation was given once in full, and its variations recorded as a single line of difference.