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Brioches
When Marie Antoinette was told that the people were starving for bread, she said, "Give them brioches !" These are a troublesome but dainty cake, popular all over France.
Sift 1/2 pound flour, and mix half of it with 1/4 ounce Vienna yeast and water to make a paste. Knead it, and put in a large bowl of warm water near the fire. Mix the rest of the flour with 1/4 ounce sugar, a pinch of salt, a tablespoonful of water, 1/4 pound butter, and 2 eggs. Beat all for a while, adding the eggs one by one. Then throw the dough on a table six times, to make it light, take out the ball of paste, now floating on the water, and roll both together several times. Put to rise for 2 hours in a cold place. Then bake it 40 minutes, egging the top to glaze it, in a hot oven. Turn out and dust with sugar.
A compact account of the classic French sponge-and-dough brioche, with the old levain flottant trick of floating the ferment in warm water. The proportions are sound; the instructions assume you already know the shape of the process.
- The hinge: keep the dough coldWith 4 oz butter to 8 oz flour this is a 50 percent butter dough, and it will turn greasy and slack if it warms much past 75F while you work it. The two-hour rise "in a cold place" is not incidental; many modern bakers give brioche dough a long cold rest, several hours or overnight in the refrigerator, before baking.
- Vienna yeastCompressed fresh yeast, sold in cakes and named for the Viennese pressed-yeast process that displaced brewer's barm in the later 19th century. A quarter ounce is about 7 g fresh; roughly 2 to 2.5 g of instant dried yeast does the same work.
- The floating spongeThe half-flour paste dropped into a bowl of warm water is a levain flottant. It sinks, ferments, fills with gas and bobs to the surface — that is your signal it is ready, and the time it takes will depend on the warmth of the water. Lift it out and let it drain a moment before combining.
- "Throw the dough on a table six times"Slap-and-fold, the standard handling for a wet enriched dough. Six throws is a bare minimum; expect to work it until it pulls cleanly from the surface and passes a windowpane test.
- Weights in modern terms8 oz flour is about 225 g, 4 oz butter about 115 g, 1/4 oz sugar about 7 g — barely sweet, as brioche should be. Eggs of the period tended to run smaller than a modern large, so read the two as medium to large.
- A hot ovenRead as roughly 400 to 425F. For a single loaf in a tin, drop towards the lower end after the first ten minutes or the crust will be dark long before the centre sets; the interior should reach about 190F.
- Forty minutes is for one large briocheThat time suits a single loaf or a brioche à tête in a fluted mould. Individual rolls of the same dough need 15 to 18 minutes.
- Glazing"Egging the top" means brushing with beaten egg, ideally yolk let down with a little milk, applied after the final rise and just before baking. Brushing a risen dough heavily can deflate it; use a soft brush and a light hand.
- YieldAbout 500 g of dough — one 8-inch loaf, or eight to ten small brioches.
The Marie Antoinette line is the most famous thing about brioche and almost certainly untrue. The phrase qu'ils mangent de la brioche appears in Rousseau's Confessions, written in the 1760s and attributed there to an unnamed "great princess" at a time when Marie Antoinette was a child in Vienna; the attachment of her name to it came later, and the story is generally treated as political legend rather than record. The dish itself is much older than the anecdote, a Norman and Parisian enriched bread whose name is usually traced to the old verb brier, to knead or pound dough. The author's "troublesome but dainty" is a fair verdict on a dough that demands a separate ferment, a long cold rise and a great deal of butter.