It do...real butter I'm guessing ?
Of course.
Herbert W. Brioche Bread
Heard an ad for some place that serves window food advertising a chicken sandwich on something called Brioche Bread, something I keep hearing about. Well figuring it’s something kinda Yuppie I decided to use Google and find out what it was and if it was something an old long haired redneck could make.
Well to my surprise it wasn't something using rare and exotic ingredients I had to go to some specialty store to buy, but just a plain old egg and milk based bread shortened with butter, with a fancy French name, dang, I’ve made that before, nothing new here.
This was disappointing because I was all ready to try something new and modern so I started searching the kitchen to see what I could find to make something a bit more fancy. First idea was whole wheat is popular among the in crowd, problem is that the whole wheat flour I had the old kind of red wheat whole wheat flour and not the new improved white whet flour that doesn’t look like or taste like traditional whole wheat, but more like white bread. (Don’t ask me, I don’t start these trends.) Well there is the “I was doing it before it was cool” so I decided to add a bit of hipster to my Yuppie bread.
With that solved I decided to make it an herbal bread and started checking my leaf supply. Found some thyme, some oregano, some dill weed, some dried onion stuff and a whole new bottle of rosemary, cool, I’ll do heavy on the rosemary and use the others to accent it. That will sound cool in a recipe.
I started by scalding around 2 cups of milk, this kills an enzyme in the milk that interferes with the yeast growth, pasteurizing should take care of it, but not always, so I always scald to be sure. The milk was put in the big bowl and covered with one of my large bread covers, these are large and colorful, the color because they look good in my camp pictures and big enough to cover a dishpan and tuck under to keep the wind from blowing them off. The scalded milk is let cool off to a bit over a 100F or about body temp with a good fever.
When cooled enough I get out my jar of yeast and shake out enough on top to just cover the top of the liquid used no matter what type of bread I am making. This is stirred in with a little white flour a little brown sugar(white sugar ain’t cool.) and then covered till it is nice and bubbly. This activates and excites the yeast, excited yeast works better, this is called proofing.
When the yeast is going good I added the herbs and the butter and stir it in, this gives the herbs time to rehydrate with out getting soggy and allows the butter to soften a bit more. I then add about 5 cups of the whole wheat flour and stir it in, this makes a soft dough called a sponge and this is also covered and let to rise while I make supper because the wife and I are hungry.
After about an hour I check on it and see not only has it risen nicely but I also forgot the egg in my hurry to make supper, leaving me with two choices, one is forget my fancy French named bread or add the egg now. Since it is still a soft sponge I chose to add my egg and stir it in.
Going to the refrigerator I grab a carton of eggs and open them, and find I have just brown eggs in it, sometimes they have blue green ones or white ones or a mix of all three. This is good because brown eggs are in style today despite the shell color not making the egg inside different than a white one, at one time white eggs were considered better, now for some reason brown is considered better and cost more. Sadly in the ultimate search for cool they were not “Free Range Organic” but just regular old farm eggs from yard birds since they run around in my brother in laws yard. But they were free instead of $5 a dozen so I went with cheap.
I decided to just use the yolks since they are richer and me hoping this compensates for not having the desired free range type. They were easy to stir in and then I added about 3 cups of white flour because I want real good loft in this loaf, something even my high gluten whole wheat won’t do with out help. This is kneaded well and allowed to rest and rise about an hour, it should double in size.
I got out a skillet to bake it in because even though I have used cast iron for the almost 60 years I have been cooking, cast iron wasn't cool till recently when it was rediscovered by the in crowd. This skillet is a 10 inch and I used aerosol olive oil on it to keep the bread from sticking, but I didn’t have no fancy main brand, just the cheap store brand. I probably should have sprinkled the pan with cornmeal but bread won’t stick to an oiled skillet that’s well seasoned. Although it don’t say it on the front label the olive oil has not even had a naughty thought, that’s what the extra stands for.
I also got another of them brown eggs and cracked it into a cup but this time used the whole eggs. I added a couple tablespoons of water and beat it well and found my food grade paint brush. I then kneaded the risen dough well and formed a loaf and put it in the skillet and painted the bread with the egg wash while the oven was warming to 375F. Had I made more dough I would have divided it for more loaves. I chose 375F so I would have a softer crust and there would also be less chance of the egg wash burning.
Because of the size of this loaf it took one hour to bake and was then removed from the oven and removed from the skillet and then I had to let is cool before I cut a piece of and covered it with butter, just to see if it was ok.
Looking at it I may have failed and have just an ordinary instead of the artisan bread I was trying to make, if you look at the finished product it does not have that cracked and ugly appearance true artisan bread is supposed to have based on the pictures I see as well as no big holes to let stuff drip out. I will say it’s good bread and I have a whole eye of round I cooked up for sandwiches, it should go well.
Since everything also has to have a fancy name anymore I have named this Herbert W Brioche Bread, any resemblance in name to a former President is accidental.