Christmas Brioche

 Yay!!! It was successful. I am so happy after 10+ hours of working on this loaf, it turned out. I watched a video on how to make brioche with way more instructions than the visually aesthetic video from the Food Network. 

This video, although long and not produced well, was extremely informative.

https://youtu.be/RZBuJ4_LdDk

I used this recipe https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes/classic-brioche-recipe this time around.  A couple things I did differently from last time. First, I mixed the dough for more than 10 min before adding the butter to develop the gluten a little further.  I beat and slightly flattened the room temp butter before incorporating it into the dough 1 tablespoon at a time. The dough was super soft and goopy and I did not add extra flour. Then I divided the dough and colored it prior to refrigeration.  It was very difficult to mix the dye into the dough because the dough was so soft and sticky. I refrigerated the dough overnight and rolled out each ball of dough. It was still sticky after a night of cooling!  I didn’t work the dough too much, but I stacked the three layers and rolled it up.  I made sure to have the white dough on the outside, so that I could have a good read on the level of browning.  Last time, I put the purple dough on the exterior/ bottom of the stack and it was so hard to tell if the dough was browning or burning.

Then came more patience....Last time I proofed the dough for an hour and it didn’t seem to rise much.  This time, the new directions stated to let the dough rise an inch beyond the loaf pan.  That took about two hours in a very warm spot between 2 crockpots.   I pressed the dough to check to see if it had overproofed.   Nope, the dough sprung back!  This time I diluted the egg wash with water and it helped reduce the amount of browning and cracking in the final product.  Additionally, I baked the loaf at 375F in convection mode for 40 min without peeking.  That was unintentional, I was supposed to check after 20, but I read the directions incorrectly.  So, 40 min later and the timer went off and the top of my brioche was a dark brown. It was just like the picture in the recipe.  I temped the product to be sure and it was above 190F.  Success!!!

And for the cross section:

Yea, okay the big bubble that is in the middle of the loaf bothers me a little, but I’m never going to make this type of bread again (if I did, I would punch down the dough and do a double proof or add milk powder to help even out the cell structure).  What a pain in the butt it is to make.  The result is like eating a stick of flavorless butter. Not worth the effort...but I proved it could do it.  It also looks super cool.

Merry Christmas!