Where does Brioches come from?
The Brioche is one of the most popular pastry products from France, the come specifically
from Alsacia Area, it is served as dessert and can be found all over the year. It is made with
sugar, eggs, milk and butter and you can find it alone or filled with chocolate, marmalade, etc.
the surface gets a golden colour before you put it in the oven, that’s how it gets its
characteristic colour, and the crumb has a more pale-yellow colour.
You can find it with multiple shapes, even with a bread shape, ring shape or hexagonal shape.
It is also common to add raisins as a complement. It is usually served as pies or as the
basement of the dessert, with a lot of local variants that add some ingredients, stuffing or
personal supplements. It is also used as a complement of foie gras or with meat dishes.
What is the origin of Brioches?
The first document of this recipe is from 1404 and it is thought that comes from a Normand
recipe.
Jean- Jacques Rousseau, is his own autobiography ‘The Confesions’, from 1783, describes as a great princess the person that was told that peasants didn’t have bread, so she said ‘Qu’ils
mangent de la Brioche!’ which means ‘Eat Brioche!’, this sentence was popularly attributed to
Maria Antonieta.
Ingredients:
400 gr of flour.
3 eggs.
50 gr of butter.
50 of powdered sugar.
150 gr of milk.
20 gr of baker’s yeast.
Salt.
Time of preparation: 3,5 hours.
How to cook Brioches:
First step: Ingredients preparation.
We are going to start this recipe with the preparation of the dough. The first thing we have to
do for that is to get a bowl with the milk inside and dilute the yeast in it.
Once you have the yeast properly diluted, we are going to add the flour, butter, the salt and
the powdered sugar, stir all the ingredients very well, until you have a homogeneous mixture,
now add the eggs and stir again, until you have a homogenous, bright and golden coloured
dough.
Top Tip: be careful you dilute the yeast properly in the milk. If you don’t do it, there will appear some lumps and the volume of the final Brioche will not be uniform.
Top Tip: you should stir in a uniform way, try not to change the speed or the rhythm and add the ingredients little by little while you are stirring, we have to avoid the apparition of lumps.
Second step: Fermentation of the dough.
Now that we have the dough, we should get a dishcloth, better if it’s made of fabric, and cover the bowl with it.
Let the dough to rest for an hour before removing the cloth. When this time has passed, you
will see that your dough has doubled its volume.
Take the dough and cut it in pieces of the desired volume, and give them a rounded shape. Put all these pieces of pastry on a tray and cover them again with a cloth. Left them there for 1 hour.
Top Tip: don’t remove the cloth until the hour is over, if you do, your dough will shrink and it
will never grow again.
Top Tip: there is people that advise to let the dough resting for a whole night before
elaborating the Brioches.
Final Step.
Take 2 or 3 eggs and stir them in a plate, put also the oven to start heating between 180 ºC
and 200 ºC.
Finally, remove the covering from the pastry and take a brush, paint all the surface of the
pastry with the eggs and put the tray inside the oven. After 20 minutes, your Brioche is finally
done!!
