high-bar baking

No, you cannot make brioche dough in a hurry. 

Maybe I shouldn’t lie in the lede, huh? You can make it. And this is technically the story of how I did. But I cannot recommend it. It’s stressful. Why be stressed out if you don’t have to be? Do as I say, not as I do. 

I wanted burger buns because I wanted to make Sloppy Joes. Why did I want to make Sloppy Joes? Because I enjoyed my childhood, ok! I wanted lowbrow, I wanted yummy, I wanted comfort. And Lord knows I needed to get rid of the can of Campbell’s Chicken Gumbo Soup in my cupboard. Only when it was too late to turn back did I realize it expired in 2022… no one died, people. 

I’d skimmed Bry’s brioche recipe and thought I’d done the math right. I had not. I was Mr. Incredible saying “I got time!” when he clearly did not have time. The biggest thing that you have to keep in mind when recipes list out the timings of all the stages (other than not just missing a pre-fridge rise, thanks self) is that you have to take into account the time it takes to do the work between the stages. Sometimes, like building strength into pizza dough every 15 minutes for an hour, the action time is negligible. In total, that’s going to take basically an hour. Brioche is not that way. Brioche takes at least fifteen minutes to get all the butter incorporated, but probably more than that. 

That’s what makes it good. Brioche is an enriched dough, which means it’s… rich. It has tons of butter and eggs (that’s where the beautiful golden colour comes from), which means it’s delicious. That also means that the gluten has a hard time linking up inside the dough, forming its magical web of tangled proteins and strength. The stuff that makes bread, bread and not cake. Eggs and butter (anything that isn’t flour and water, really) get in the way of that protein cross-linking and make it take a lot more effort to develop. More effort in this case translates to a lot of mechanical action, which means a lot more time in the stand mixer. 

And then there’s fridge time. Cold fermentation allows dough to develop flavour without taking on too much gas in the process. If you left dough on the counter, the yeast would continue to eat away, produce gas, and everything would rise too high and collapse in the oven. Overnight in the fridge, the flavours can get to know each other and the yeast can slowwwwwly do some work without compromising any structural integrity. 

Did I have time for a very long fridge ferment? Nope. Butter had to carry the day on its own. Fear not, it managed. 

It’s also important when you’re messing around with recipes to know what you’re doing. I knew that the hour after the fridge was to get the dough back up to temperature, so I left that hour undisturbed. Less fridge time just meant less pronounced flavour; baking it from half-cold was going to mean a weird and possibly uneven bake. You have to know the rules before you can break them.

And everything turned out fine! As it so often does. There can’t be a metaphor in there somewhere. No way.