Brioche

Ask not what copious amounts of eggs and butter can do for you...

My perceptive husband got me The French Laundry Cookbook for my birthday in May (Actually, he'd be the first to admit that he's not that perceptive. Apparently I've been yammering on about some blog or other.). Ever since, from a dorm room extra-long twin bed in Athens, GA, I've dreamed of making pasta and brioche, two of the richest recipes therein that, nevertheless, do not require unusual ingredients.

Brioche. Why did that word strike terror into my veins? I surfed my bookshelves and found Alton Brown's I'm Just Here for More Food, his baking tome. In it, he gives a cute, detailed description of how his pizza dough, which is phenomenal and hasn't failed me yet, gives birth to a brioche dough. The recipe involves folding butter into a wet dough by hand in layers and slapping it around. Reading it again gave me the shivers. I'm sure his science is sound, but man, I hate scraping dough crap off my palms, then finding little bits of dough crust between my fingers hours later.

This dough was no match for my Kitchen Aid Pro Mixer.

I was super-worried when I stuck the dough in the fridge for the overnight rise. It was sticky. How can a dough composed mostly of sugar, butter, and eggs, and half cake flour develop enough to rise? I pulled out the dough the next day, cut it in half, shaped it into rectangles, and dropped them into loaf pans for a 3-hour rise. They were puny. I carried the babies upstairs and put them in my sunniest window. Sometime during this afternoon, the air conditioner must have gone out. Divine intervention?

Against all odds...

It rose above the pan, I baked it with my brand-new oven thermometer and discovered that my oven can be off by as much as 50 degrees -- good to know -- and all was well, except my house was 80 degrees and rising.

I tend to get repetitive when describing flavors, so I'll let Carol give it a go:

"It was eggy and bready and light and airy and fluffy like a floaty, delicious pillow of lovely, cakey goodness."

So there you are.

We made BLTs out of the bread, of which more, later.

Find someone too sweet to say no (in this case, my sister) to take the other loaf off your hands, or banish it to the freezer, or make some luxurious croutons from it.