Brioche, part 2
And what I saw was a great tool just waiting to be used. I got right to it, thinking if this worked as great as Joe said it would, I could cut my ties to Krispy Kreme and Cinnabon. Oh joy!
As I looked at the procedure, I noted that though it was simple, it was going to take me a while to arrive at my desired location, a very long while.
No matter, I said, off to work I go. I followed his instructions step by step, careful to allow the dough to rest as long as he said to. Making certain my eggs were cold and my butter was soft.
But as I went along, I kept thinking, this isn’t going to yield very much dough. And then after it proofed I thought, sure its doubled in size but its such an odd thing that I’ll never be able to do anything with it. And all sorts of other helpful thoughts like that.
But, after allowing it to spend the night in the refrigerator, I removed it the next morning and found a ‘good sized amount’ of very firm dough.
So I rolled it out, sprinkled on lots and lots of brown sugar and a bit of cinnamon. Then I proceeded to roll it up. But, I had a few problems. One was getting the dough to roll in a tight fashion and another was shoring up the sides. Actually, rolling the dough presented two problems all by itself and then shoring the sides brought the count up to three.
The first problem occurred because I’ve only ever used cooking oil to roll out my doughs. They roll out easily with it and clean up is a breeze. But as Joe said to use flour, I had to use flour. Which meant of course that I had to make the typical newbie mistake and under flour my workspace. Which meant of course that the dough had to stick. Argh!
The second problem was that I am not used to working with such a fragile dough and it tore. (Now, I’d rather not take the blame for the tear, but as I was the only one working with it, I feel I should.) And of course I had no idea how to repair it. I did try; however, putting flour on the wound did it no good.
The third problem was getting the sides uniform. Try as I might, things were not lining up right. In the end, I just decided to do a little cosmetic surgery with my dough scrapper. There, that’s better.
The whole time I was wondering if brioche was really worth all of this.
