Brioche. Because Sourdough is Hard.

Soooo it has been a while since I last blogged.  And there is a reason for that.  I had this brilliant plan that I was going to make a sourdough starter and then wow everyone with my genius baking skills when I unveiled homemade sourdough bread.  However, my sourdough starter… yeah, no.  It did not work.  At all.  I combined a grated apple with bread flour and water, as instructed by Paul, and let it sit for a few days, and it developed an aroma and appearance similar to stinky gym socks.  Or the men of my mixed show choir after a four hour dance rehearsal.  Or a cracked egg left out in the sun for several hours.  You get the idea.  I reread Paul’s recipe and noted that he said the smell should be “slightly sweet, like cider.”  I shook my head, decided that we had different ideas of the word “sweet,” fed the dough, and left it again.  The smell worsened and I grew concerned that the monster blob might soon start attacking my cats, like Audrey 2 in Little Shop of Horrors.  I put it down the drain and abandoned my kitchen in disgust for a few days.

The reasons for this failure could be many, according to the most accurate source of all knowledge.  (Random googling.) Maybe I use too much anti-bacterial soap in my home?  Maybe I should have used an organic apple?  Maybe I let it develop too long or not long enough or not at the right temperature or…. who knows.  I’ll try again another week.

Yesterday, I cracked open my book again to allow Paul to redeem himself, and he sure knocked it out of the park with this one.  MMMMMMMmmmmm.

Paul has a section dedicated to brioche, which is a soft bread made with an enriched dough.  I thought I was going to just make regular brioche, but I happened to buy a brick of brie at the grocery store, and so decided to go crazy and stuff it with cheese.  I wish I had some humorous story about this recipe, but sadly it was well-written and the recipe worked perfectly.  It was a little messy, though.  First, the dough.

Brioche uses the usual suspects for bread dough.  Flour, salt, yeast.  However, it is an enriched dough, so it has lots of good things in it that make it highly caloric and super tasty.  So, after mixing the dry ingredients, I added whole milk, five eggs, and the primary ingredient, BUTTER.  Lots of it.  Actually, I mixed the rest of the stuff then slowly added the butter.  This mixing process was very challenging, because I am not quite adult enough to own a stand mixer, and this was a sloppy mixture.  I did my best with my hand mixer and eventually gave in to the inevitable and got my hands involved.

I chilled it overnight to get the butter to solidify again.  I turned it out, gave it a little knead, and rolled it into little balls.  The recipe called for 14 equal spheres of dough and 14 equal pieces of cheese.  After some weighing and scribbling of numbers, I quickly gave up on getting them even and eye-balled it.  I shaped it into little flowers, and left them to prove while I went and saw Spider-man, using my patented garbage-bag-and-hotbox-cups method.  I came back and was very pleased to see they had risen quite a bit… enriched dough can take a long time, according to Paul.

After a little egg wash, they went into the oven for twenty-ish minutes, and came out melty and golden and oh so good.  The soft bread texture melts in with the creamy cheese so well, and it’s incredibly comforting to have homemade bread on hand at the beginning of what will surely be a long work-week. What goes better with brie than wine?  Or, err…. if you are reading this and you are my student, that’s grape juice, I swear.

Oh, Paul.  Thanks for this gooey deliciouness to fight this bitterly horrible chill outside.

Stay warm, y’all.