Sick Day Doings

The sniffles started around lunchtime on Thursday. By the time I left the office, I was in full-tilt sneeze mode. Our Homeowners’ Association annual meeting was that night, but I sent Julian there solo and was in bed by 8:30. I woke up at 3 on Friday morning, took some decongestant, emailed in sick, and went back to bed.

I was born with farm girl genes; therefore, I find it hard to sleep during the day unless I’m really sick. So I did some laundry and looked through my food porn magazines in search of something to bake. I settled on a no-knead brioche recipe I found in Cook’s Illustrated. Most no-knead bread recipes contain just flour, water, yeast, and salt. Brioches are heavy on the butter and eggs, and this recipe is no exception: 6 eggs and 1/2 pound of butter for two loaves. (My cardiologist cronies wouldn’t approve, but they don’t read my blog.) The key to incorporating the butter into the dough is to melt it, let it cool to about body temperature, and then mix it with the eggs to emulsify it. Make sure you cool the butter; otherwise, you’ll end up with greasy scrambled eggs.

This recipe may bill itself as no-knead, but you do have to fold the dough several times over the course of two hours. It was a very wet dough, so I used a flexible scraper to do the folding. After the folding, it goes into the refrigerator overnight or up to two days. This helps further develop the gluten. Leaner (no sugar, fat, or eggs) no-knead bread doughs can rise at room temperature, but the amount of eggs in this recipe would be a breeding ground for not-very-nice bacteria along with the yeast; hence, to the fridge it went.

A wet brioche dough, after some folding.

I took a look at the dough as I was putting away the dinner fixings. Much to my surprise/horror, it had reached the top of the bowl. Since cleaning up a large, glutenous amoeba seeping out of the fridge is not my idea of fun, I grabbed the largest bowl in the cupboard, oozed the dough into it, and returned it to the bottom shelf. Fortunately, the larger bowl contained the blob quite nicely when I peeked at it the next morning.

By the time I shaped it into loaves, the dough was supple and not too tacky. The loaves rose for about 90 minutes, then got baked in a 350° oven for 40 minutes. The results are below. The loaves were very tender. I used a couple of slices for French toast for Sunday brunch. I sliced them and left them on the cutting board underneath a sheet of parchment paper to dry out a little. Had I cut the slices just before soaking in the egg mixture, they would have disintegrated. This was worth making again, even when I’m not sick.

Beautiful brioches.