Qu’ils mangent de la brioche

This week my partner Hamilton headed back to NYC for a few weeks of work. After that he'll be back over in the Netherlands while his UK visa is being processed. Basically this means that I'm on my own here in London for the better part of the spring. This has pretty much been our life over the past few years since we moved abroad, first to Amsterdam, and now to the UK. We often talk about some imagined future where things will be more stable, we'll have a more 'normal' life, but who are we kidding? This is our normal.

For as much as I relish the quiet time to focus and the chance to avoid being tempted into eating cheeseburgers, the monotony of the aloneness is what wears me down and draws me too deeply inward. So during these times, I tend to invent little projects for myself, assignments with checklists to tackle and milestones to meet.

It was in one of these periods- actually right before we moved from Brooklyn to Amsterdam- that I decided to tackle brioche. Hamilton was abroad, setting up our business, and I was in the States, finishing out the last weeks of my amazing job as a design director in an innovation lab, getting our household packed up, and Andy the cat's pet passport sorted. So yeah, it made a lot of sense to spend my free time baking bread. Why not.

I think the reason why I honed my focus on brioche was because of its fundamental nature. Brioche, or more specifically, enriched doughs are building blocks of bread baking and pastry making. It's in my nature to approach things somewhat academically, so in a way, I was creating a kind of curriculum for myself, culinary school- student population: one.

Because it was also incredibly astute to buy a pile of heavy cookbooks while packing for an international move, I acquired three of what are widely considered bread-baking essentials:
- Jeffrey Hamelman's Bread;
- Elizabeth Prueitt and Chad Robertson's Tartine 
- Peter Reinhart's The Bread Baker's Apprentice

Ok, actually I acquired several more, but I don't want to invite judgment on my runaway cookbook habit. cantstopwontstop.

Up to this point I don't think I'd ever specifically baked a brioche. But I did have experience with enriched dough, in the form of my grandmother's poppyseed bread. That bread forms, like many things cooked by my grandma and mother, an essential taste memory for me. There is some miraculous connection of synapses in my personal neurology that registers precisely the five senses that add up to this poppyseed bread. The loaf was a holiday tradition in our family, particularly at Christmas, when in addition to their formidable pierogi-making operation, my grandma and great-aunt Claire would crank out dozens of these loaves to be gifted to friends, family, teachers- everyone, really.

The dough is somewhere between a babka and a lean brioche, with a tender yet rich crumb. It has three stages of rising before it's even shaped and ready for its final proof, giving the loaf its strength and the ability to hoist an intimidating amount of sticky poppyseed filling aloft in the oven.

Back to my brioche project. Before I'd even cracked one of textbooks above, my very first attempt was from one of my favorite inspiration references, Jody Williams's Buvette (I've already mentioned her Campari-blood orange marmalade). Williams's recipe was for brioches à têtes, those adorable two-bite puffs that are capped with a jaunty little beret of dough just begging to be pulled off, like the ears on a chocolate Easter bunny. As it happened, I'd inherited a set of the proper fluted tins from my grandma, so I was well-equipped. To be honest I don't remember much about how they turned out- tasty, I'm sure, but I do remember that cleaning those tins was a bitch.

They did, however, set me forth on what has become a most quintessentially Proustian pursuit, with every end reached just the beginning of a new path.

After much experimentation, it's Reinhart's "Middle Class" brioche that has become my baseline, with its Goldilocks' proportions of just enough butter and milk to give the feeling of an indulgent but not wholly inappropriate breakfast. If you want inappropriate, try his "Rich Man's" brioche recipe, for those mornings when you just want to say fuck it, and go down in a blaze of glory with spoonfuls of Nutella straight from the jar, a plate of bacon, and bottomless mimosas. YOLO.

The MCB, as I refer to it in my notes, is endlessly adaptable, a clever shape-shifter that makes a perfectly prim and tidy loaf with a glossy crust and a lacy interior, but also rocks up like Sandy at the Rydell High carnival– oozing sex as a naughty miso-caramel sticky bun, just waiting to be torn apart. Tell me about it, stud.

I've also turned it into a boozy, unctuous baba au rhum, baked in savarin mold and then piped with mascarpone cream and topped with candied kumquats and yeah, more rum. As for my grandma's poppyseed loaf, I've evolved her dough to be closer to the MC, which was really just a few subtle tweaks, and I like to think she'd approve.

And because Reinhart's brioche class system also offers a more lean variation that goes easier on the butter and eggs, his "Poor Man's" version was perfect for when I made rillettes en croute with cranberry preserves for a holiday market. The characteristic softness of a brioche was not sacrificed for a dough that would still hold it's shape perfectly, domed around the savoury pork filling.

Once in awhile, I'll veer off course to try another variation if the recipe intrigues me. I did this last week, working on an experiment I'm sharing with a friend. I hemmed and hawed over it, and ultimately decided (in the name of science, of course) that I'd try Maura Kilpatrick's tahini brioche dough, from Ana Sortun's latest, Soframiz. (Sidenote: this is a fantastic and long-awaited compilation of favorites from their magnificent all-day Middle Eastern larder Sofra, where North Cambridge flows into Watertown, back home in Massachusetts.)

The idea I'm working on is a tahini babka swirled with citrusy sumac chocolate ganache. Compared to my gorgeous and well-behaved MCB, this dough was a floppy, flabby nightmare to deal with, especially when trying to twist into the standard babka shape. What a mess! I ended up just kind of lobbing these gnarly blobs into their loaf pans and crossing my fingers. I wasn't feeling very optimistic when they didn't achieve the delicate puffiness I'm used to during the final proof. But you know what? It all worked out. The crumb was light and open, and by some miraculous feat, the chocolate spiraled with Instagrammable perfection, defying expectations. All of that said, I still think I'm going to have a go adapting the good ol' MCB, and replacing some of the butter with tahini for my next round of this loaf. Stay tuned for further developments.

However, a recipe from Liz Prueitt via Tartine Book No. 3 has me leaning toward polyamory these days. I started playing with her Smoked Potato Brioche over Thanksgiving, a hybrid loaf that includes sourdough leaven, an overnight poolish, and a pinch of instant yeast. The addition of semolina flour creates a bright and warm golden hue. The results- which have been reliable over several iterations as loaves and buns (with and without the smoked potato)- are consistently breathtaking. Since I've been developing my sourdough practice over the past few years, being able to better understand the balance of time and temperature has rewarded me with an extraordinarily light crumb, open with the honeycomb pockets of air that come with successful management of fermentation. This is probably the best bread I've ever baked. An actual and bona fide French person has raved that it's the best brioche he's had...outside of France. I will accept that semi-compliment!

I'll admit- it's not a beginner's recipe; MCB, on the other hand, is incredibly approachable and straightforward. So that's what I'm sharing with you today, with only the slightest adaptations from the original, in the hopes that you'll embark on your own brioche journey, or at least your own attempt to impress a French person.