I’ve fallen behind a little on posting once a week, but I haven’t (yet) fallen behind on making one of these recipes once a week. One step at a time. Next up, I offer you 17-7: Brioches, which is a NEW BOOK recipe.
Simply Delicious claims that the ball on top is common–I don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen that. I feel like usually you see brioche buns in more of a standard hamburger bun style, maybe with a slice or two on top. I should have gone with that instead of trying to do the ball on top.
Make sure you’re ready to spend some time on these, because it’s not a quick process.
Ingredients. Don’t forget the extra egg for the egg wash.
The ingredient list shows 3 cups of flour, but they have you use 2 3/4 cups to make the dough. That extra 1/4 (shown here) is used later on in step 3, but you need to pull it out at the beginning and set it aside for later.
I decided to use my food processor to make the dough instead of a pastry cutter. Here’s “coarse crumbs” formed.
Don’t mind the orange, it was part of another (non-Simply Delicious-related) recipe.
Water is up to temp (per the thermometer).
Yeast is tossed in to bloom.
Adding the eggs to the dough.
After mixing, extracting, and placing (rounded and tucked) into a greased bowl to rise.
It wasn’t quite warm enough in my kitchen to get a good rise, so I decided to place it (covered) on top of my chest freezer in my garage instead. I’ll check back on this in an hour or so.
One hour later…looking slightly larger, but still has some time to go.
While the dough rises, I’ll prep the pans.
Don’t mind my chop-and-prop going in the background, I had a LONG pothos vine that needed to be turned into separate plants.
Another hour later…now that’s a good rise. Time to bring it back inside.
We’re finally to Step 3, and it’s time for that extra 1/4 cup of flour. Here’s where I want to advise–use some of that flour for the counter, don’t get extra on top of the 1/4 cup like I did. You’ll end up with too much later on.
My 1/4 cup of flour and 1/4 cup (approximately) of dough that I’ll turn into the little balls for the tops of the rolls.
I divided the brioche dough into 16 not-so-even pieces for rolling.
Working my way through the rolling process. Takes me back to the restaurant days…
As you can see, my sizes are a little…varied. I’m rusty, what can I say.
Divided up the very stiff extra dough for the balls. I don’t know WHY they have you put extra flour into the dough, it just makes them gummy. If I did it again, I’d just do the balls without the extra flour.
Honestly, if I did it again I’d just make them like real buns and 86 the stupid top balls altogether.
Nice buns with stupid balls on top. They still need to proof, so off to the garage again they go.
Before the proof…we’ll check back on these in 30 minutes or so.
It’s later in the day, so it’s also warmer in the garage–they rose quite a bit in the time they were out there.
I gave them a quick egg wash (one egg mixed up and diluted with some water) with a pastry brush and stuck them in the oven.
After baking. They would have looked SO much better without those stupid balls.
Final result. I wrapped most of them and stuck them in my freezer, but you can’t resist fresh bread when it’s right out of the oven, can you?
Of course you can’t. Had one with butter, was quite good. But don’t put the stupid balls on them.
Grade: A-
