Run out of ready-made brioche or just want to flavor the best of France firsthand? Let’s make this Brioche recipe and enjoy life’s greatest!

Brioche is a French bread and that leaves us with very little need to tell anything more about it if we want to sell it to anyone who’ve ever tried any French pastry. What marks its distinction from other breads around, is its butter and eggs content and the long kneading time required to make it.

While enriching the dough with eggs and butter makes its crumb soft and tender, the elongated kneading process forms gluten strains rarely seen among the less effort requiring breads.

Luckily, we don’t have to knead the dough by hand and we can use our favorite kitchen robot to do the work for us, bearing only the burden of listening to its whining while waiting patiently, or Zen like prepping our hot chocolate for the brioche.

Although commercially available varieties mostly packed with sugar, brioche doesn’t require added sweetener to be enjoyable at all. Especially not if we plan to use it with savory dishes, like the French do.

Of course, if we have grown accustomed to the quality, frequently found on the shops’ shelves with thrilling periods of best before dates for our careless self, but well beyond the comfort zone to be considered a healthy option for our new health conscious one, we may have a harder time accepting that brioche is not always supposed to be as sweet as a Mars bar.

Luckily, even if we happen to find ourselves in a situation where brioche lacks sweetener, for various external or internal psychological reasons, we can still spread some butter and jam on top anytime to have something to bite with our 10’o clock coffee.

Brioche may be found in many forms. The fanciest looking one is probably the scone shaped Parisian one with two levels of towering beauty. But for those who couldn’t bother with such artistic presentation, brioche can be rolled into individual balls or frequently seen taking the very space conscious form of a bread loaf, particularly when sold prepackaged at our favorite grocery store.

Brioche, as any other bread, tastes best fresh from the oven but many of us who learnt to love it during the years far from the seductive smells of a French pastry shop, may have done so, because fell in love with the texture known from letting the brioche on the shelves of the shops for a time specified by the preservative’s supplier.

Thanks God, we don’t have to beef up our brioche with such artificial ingredients and all we have to do is to let our freshly made brioche out in the wild to roam overnight, to find ourselves with the familiar texture of the shops in the morning.

Of course, once we try them fresh, we may not want to do such nonsense to our new favorite bread but before we embark on a journey of troubleshooting why our homemade brioche hasn’t got the same texture as the shop bought one, let things settle first and only then dive deep into dough science.

Butter is a crucial ingredient of any brioche and if we are on a diet, it won’t be an ideal choice for any of them, except maybe if we need to pull a Rene Zellweger and bulk up for a role of our life or the unlikely event of growing into our wedding gown.

Nowadays a 2:1 flour to butter ratio is reasonable but early brioche went as far as 3:2 for those whose social status allowed or as low as 4:1 for those who wanted to live like the lords but couldn’t.

In our modern era, we aren’t restricted by class constrains if it comes to food choices or at least not directly imposed on us by the laws of ruling elite, and we can tailor our menu to our energy expenditure or more likely to our taste buds.

Although that we can, it doesn’t mean that we should, or at least not all the time, given that we want to maintain a reasonably sane waistline or a matter of fact a healthy life with an occasional dollop of joy spread over it.

Ingredients

Starter

⅞ cup / 100g Flour
½ cup / 100ml Milk
¼ teaspoon / 1g Fresh yeast

Dough

5 cups / 600g All purpose white flour
6 medium / 300g Eggs
2 tablespoons / 30g Honey or sweetener of choice
2 teaspoons / 10g Salt
2 sticks / 200g Butter
1 medium / 20g Egg yolk (for egg wash)

How to make Brioche

Starter

Mix the flour, milk and yeast together until uniform dough forms. Place a lid on and put it in the fridge overnight. Making starter is optional step that provides additional flavor to the dough. If starter is not used just add the ingredients to the dough, especially the yeast.

Dough

Knead starter dough, all purpose white flour, eggs, honey or sweetener of choice and salt until it comes together.
Add the butter and knead until there is a stretchy dough. It takes quite a time, about 30 minutes or so.
Cover the dough and place it to a 68°F – 81°F / 20°C – 27°C corner to raise for 45 – 90 minutes.
Take the dough onto a slightly floured surface and cut it in half.
Roll one half out then cut into six.
Take one of the six dough and roll it out about double the size. We can simply stretch or press the dough out by hand, so no rolling pin is needed.
Make an envelope letter fold by folding one third of the dough down and the other third up.
Rotate the dough then roll it out again but this time only as wide as our bread loaf mold.
Roll the dough up. Repeat with the other five squares.
Place the rolls into the bread loaf mold. Cover them then place them to a 68°F – 81°F / 20°C – 27°C corner to raise.
Make egg wash by separating egg yolk from the white then whisk the yolk up. Brush the dough with egg wash.
Put the dough into the middle rack of a 375°F / 190°C preheated oven until golden brown, about 30 minutes.
If bread loaves aren’t really our thing or stretching and rolling seems like a lot of work, just divide the dough.
Roll the dough into balls. Check out how to roll.
Place the dough balls into a baking form.
Cover the dough and place it to a 68°F – 81°F / 20°C – 27°C corner to raise for 45 – 90 minutes. Make egg wash by separating egg yolk from the white then whisk the yolk up. Brush the dough with egg wash.
Put the dough into the middle rack of a 375°F / 190°C preheated oven until the middle registers (200°F / 95°C). Which should happen when its top is golden brown, and about 20 – 30 minutes have passed.
Wait for a couple of minutes before turning the loaf onto a cooling rack to cool off completely and tear into it.