Nice and Naughty: Butterless Brioche and Plastered Plums

...or will it be naughty and nice? Your call!

For the brioche recipe, look no further than Tartine Bread by Chad Robertson. If you don't own it and your local library can't get it for you, you could go browse the book on the amazon.com website, look inside and search for brioche. If you are lucky enough (I was the first time I tried), it will let you browse pages 151-152 where you'll find the olive oil brioche recipe. Alternatively if you speak Spanish or don't mind using Google Translate, you can check out Madrid Tiene Miega, the blog where I got the idea of making this dessert bread to accompany the wickedest, meanest, craziest plums I have ever had the pleasure of serving.

Tartine's olive oil brioche has a delicate and complex taste. I was a bit hesitant to use our regular extra-virgin olive oil as I thought it might be a bit too fruity but Chad says to use a strong-flavored oil, so I went for it and found that it played a wonderfully supportive role to the poolish and the levain. You don't actually taste it (at least I couldn't) but you definitely taste more than slowly fermented grain. A truly intriguing combination. The original recipe calls for orange-blossom water, which may not be easy to find if you don't have access to a Mid-Eastern market. If that's the case, steeping a few crushed cardamom pods or whole saffron threads in the warm milk for a few minutes is a good substitute. Both go well with the taste of the brioche provided you err on the side of caution with the amount of spice and you make sure to strain the milk before using it in the dough. Skipping the extra flavor is also an option.

I had no luck finding orange-blossom water, so I used green cardamom pods (3 g total which I crushed in a mortar with a pestle). I halved the original amounts given in the book for all the ingredients (which I now regret as it would have been just as easy to make the whole batch and freeze half), especially as the dough is a pain to work with. It is super wet and looks like pancake batter for the longest time. I must tell you as well that I ended up adding about 120 g of flour to make it finally come together. I also switched the mixer to high speed - instead of medium - for the final couple of minutes. That may explain why I got a tighter crumb than I had been shooting for.

Halved, the recipe yielded one big brioche and about 20 small ones (scaled at 50 g raw). In half-a-dozen of those (the ones which were to accompany another dessert), I hid two or three of the exquisite chocolate-covered cherries my friend Kim, a talented baker if I ever saw one, had sent me from Wisconsin (thank you, Kimmy!). I love the tangy taste of cherries both with cardamom and with saffron although I don't know how well it would fare with orange-blossom water. The crumb looks a bit dry on the picture below and it was: since I had forgotten to take a crumb shot, I had to photograph the last surviving brioche. It was 5 days old...

I just gave you nice. Ready for naughty? Read on!

Back in France when I was growing up, dried plums were these dark oblong unidentified objects which were so hard that you had to soak and simmer them before you could eat them. Once cooked, they tasted watery and you had to watch out for the pit or you'd crack your teeth. I never liked them then but they were supposedly good for us, so in the winter they appeared regularly as a dessert on our dinner table. Some years later, we had fleshier ones which we pitted, stuffed with almond paste and rolled in crystallized sugar. They were a special Christmas treat and definitely a step up!

But now, oh now, I have stumbled upon a completely different beast, one that will probably remain forever my ultimate winter after-dinner treat: dried plums slow-soaked in vodka... It definitely takes a while for them to bloom into their magnificent taste and texture, so even though it might be tempting to make them for the holidays this year, if I were you, I would just make them now and then wait until the end of January to enjoy them. They will be an excellent antidote to the winter doldrums and, provided you are not tailgating it and having to drive home but watching the game on your couch with nowhere else to go, you might even make them the star of your Super Bowl party if there are no teenagers around (although as long as you tell them it's prunes, they probably won't go near the stuff anyway).

The fruit sold in some parts of the country as California prunes and in others as California dried plums (isn't it interesting that some states are more prune-tolerant than others?) has almost nothing in common with what I knew as a child. It is fleshy to the point of quasi-roundness and it has been pitted. It is quite tasty on its own if you actually like dried plums, which I do.

Now every summer, back when I lived in France as a grown-up, I used to make "framboises à l'eau-de-vie" (raspberries in brandy, literally acqua vitae) with a special spirit they sell over there just for macerating fruit. Since raspberries were delicious and plentiful this summer in the Pacific Northwest, I decided to preserve some in brandy for the winter. I couldn't find a suitable brandy at the local liquor store however, so I used vodka (100-proof). It does pack a wallop. A less potent version would do just as well, I suspect.

The vodka-marinated raspberries retained their plump shape and even some of their color and they looked pretty but the taste wasn't what I was looking for. Of course the reason could be that I really don't like vodka, never did and probably never will and they tasted like vodka flavored with children's cough syrup (probably because I misguidedly decided to flavor the vodka with a few hyssop leaves). In any case, not a success...

I was contemplating the berries and wondering what to do with the leftover vodka (I had bought a large bottle) when I had a sudden flash of inspiration. Since I always keep dried plums in the house, why not try and see if they would work? After the raspberry fiasco, I had little hope. Still, ever the optimist, I took a small jar (one which had contained jam or jelly in another life) and packed it tight with the fruit, then filled it with vodka (not the raspberry-infused vodka but fresh vodka) to the brim, screwed the lid back, put it away and forgot about it for six weeks.

When we opened the jar, the vodka was gone! It had mostly been soaked up by the fruit and whatever was left had turned into a syrupy boozy liqueur which tasted fantastic. I have since made two big jars of the plums, one which I am keeping at low temperature (in the garage actually) and the other one at room temp, just to see if it makes a difference (I'll let you know if you are interested but I won't find out for another four weeks). I have also added some vodka to the new jars at the two-week mark as I found the plums had been at the sauce again and the top ones were no longer covered. But one thing you need to know is that each time you add vodka you are thinning out the liquor which means you will have to wait longer until you can fully savor the plums. In other words you have to choose between having more or having sooner. As I said, it's your call...

The Butterless Brioche and Plastered Plums will be going to Susan for Yeastspotting, her weekly roundup of breads and other baked goodies.

The Wonders of Brioche: Leslie Mackie's Kugelhopf

The Wonders of Brioche is the title of the BBGA-sponsored class I recently took at Macrina Bakery in Seattle, Washington. It was taught by Leslie Mackie, founder of the bakery and author of the popular Macrina Bakery & Café Cookbook.

Before I took the class, I thought of a brioche as a soft and buttery little bread with a funny hat like the ones I grew up seeing in every Parisian bakery and that pretty much summed up all I knew or wished to know on the subject. Butter and sugar are two ingredients I try to avoid in my baking, mostly for health reasons, so I never gave brioche much thought.

But the class flyer described brioche as "one of the most versatile doughs", one which could be used to make roasted vegetables savory bread pudding, sandwich bialys and kugelhopfs, to name a few possibilities, and that new take on an age-old dough piqued my interest. Plus I had wanted to meet Leslie and discover Macrina ever since Bon Appétit ranked it among the 10 best bakeries in the US. More importantly still, I couldn't pass up a BBGA baking event in my own backyard (we are in the process of moving to the Seattle area). So I took the class.

I didn't regret it. Not only is Leslie a skilled and gracious instructor but I met passionate bread people from all over: Debbie who recently opened a bakery in North Carolina with her two daughters; Tom, a retired computer consultant who moved to the West Coast of Mexico after 30 years in New York and plans to open a little bakery there; Nieva who would like to retire one day to her native Philippines and open her own bakery in her hometown; Bob, a serious homebaker who built himself a wood-fire oven on his patio on nearby Bainbridge Island; Diane, a community developer who lives on a farm near Victoria, B.C., raises goats, makes her own cheese and bakes up a storm every week; Marina, an inspired young head baker from Minnesota who is looking to expand her product line; Julie, who lives in Southern Washington and with whom I took a weekend tart baking class at SFBI last year, among many others.

We made two doughs, one sweet and one savory or rather, Leslie demoed the mixing of the savory dough and we mixed the other one. I was surprised to see her add sugar to the savory dough (which we were going to use to make bialys and bread pudding). When I asked her about it, she said it just wouldn't be brioche without it, so while she reduced the amount of sugar, she still put some in.

I then asked about possibly reducing the amount of butter or substituting some wholegrain flour for a percentage of the white flour and got the same answer. It just wouldn't be brioche. See? There is no Santa Claus after all... But Leslie encouraged me to go ahead and try anyway and see if what I like what I get. Maybe I would find the trade-off worthwhile. So sooner or later I will indeed give it a shot.

Leslie's baking style reflects her lifelong interest in flavor-building, a devotion she attributes partly to her mom whose idea of spring break was to take her daughters to San Francisco (the family lived in Portland, Oregon) on whirlwind gourmet-eating expeditions.

After graduating from the California Culinary Academy, Leslie lived in Los Angeles at the time when Nancy Silverton was experimenting with bread. As she puts it, "it lit a fire." She went to baking school in France at Aurillac, toured artisan bakeries in Italy where she ate her way through more than a hundred loaves, soaking up traditional flavors and techniques, and by the time she was done, the fire had taken hold of her for good. She came back resolved to open her own bakery one day. She trained for a month in Seattle with Tomas Solis at Grand Central Bakery where she was then hired as a head baker and where she worked for four years before finally realizing her dream. Everything else she knows, she says she learned through trial and error and through her association with BBGA.

A firm believer in the value of the intuitive process, she loves to experiment and now that she has brought in partners into the business she started 17 years ago, she can spend most of her days thinking up new recipes or experimenting with innovative takes on older ones.

Her bialys for instance look and taste like no other bialys I had ever seen or eaten. They are airy and soft and make a terrific sandwich (although I could do without the slightly sweet taste): watching Leslie build a fried egg sandwich on an onion-poppyseed bialy is a treat in itself. No wonder her customers descend upon these breakfast sandwiches like locusts upon a field of tender shoots: she orchestrates the flavors like a maestra.

But of all the things we made during the class, the kugelhopf was my favorite. Now I am not an expert on kugelhopf and I am sure excellent ones are to be found elsewhere. But to be frank, on a scale of 1 to 10, I am usually sorely tempted to give a score of 3 or 4 to the ones offered for sale in French bakeries, particularly in the Alsace where they lurk in every shopwindow. They are all too often dry with a sandy crumb. Before I took the class, the only attraction they held for me was the beautiful molds they are traditionally baked in.

However Leslie doesn't bake her kugelhopf in a traditional mold. She uses a Bundt pan. Also, she doesn't just put the dough in the pan. She first laminates it with extra butter, then she rolls it up in a tube, somehow attaches the two ends together to form a ring and transfers the whole thing to the pan where it is allowed to rise seam-side up in a voluptuous pillowy circle.

Her kugelhopfs are light and delicious. They taste like no other kugelhopf I have ever had but hey, that's the whole point... They are fantastic. Because of their high butter/high sugar content, they won't become a staple in our house but I suspect they'll appear on our holiday tables from now on. They are just too good to pass up...

Leslie doesn't use baker percentages and she doesn't do grams (her book uses cups and tablespoons, probably because it mostly targets homebakers). At the bakery she works with pounds and fractions of pounds. But she took pity on us and gave us the formula for her brioche dough.

Macrina Sweet Brioche Dough

(please note that this dough is best mixed in a mixer)

All-purpose flour, unbleached 100 %

Milk, at room temperature 51.85 %

Eggs 22.22 %

Sugar 13.85 %

Butter, at room temperature 22.22 %

Salt 1.41 %

Instant Yeast 0.67 %

Vanilla Extract 2.59 %

Total 214.81 %

Method

1. Mix milk and yeast and let rest a few minutes
2. Pour flour, salt, vanilla and eggs in mixer
3. Mix 4 to 5 minutes on 1st speed, adding butter in small pieces while the mixer is running and after flour and milk have been incorporated
4. Switch to 3rd speed and mix for 5 minutes, gently shaking in the sugar
5. Continue mixing another 5 minutes on 3rd speed (desired dough temperature after mixing: 78°F/26°C)
6. Transfer to covered oiled container and set aside for 2 hours (fermentation)

Ingredients (for 3 kugelhopfs)

Filling

• 500 g brown sugar
• 170 g chopped walnuts
• 10 g cinnamon
• 10 g cocoa powder
• 140 g unsalted butter, melted
• 10 g vanilla

Dough

• 1.88 kg sweet brioche dough
• 330 g unsalted butter

Method

1. Mix all ingredients together, set aside
2. Flatten/degass the dough
3. Spread the softened butter over 2/3 of the dough
4. Do a triple fold and roll out the dough
5. Let is rest for 30 minutes, covered with plastic in a walk-in cooler or in the refrigerator
6. Roll out the dough to 1/2 inch-thick, spread filling over the dough
7. Roll up like a cinnamon roll. Divide into 3 equal pieces
8. Place in buttered bundt pan baking molds, seam-side up
9. Let proof at room temperature for 1 hour, then put in the walk-in or in the refrigerator overnight
10. The day after, bring out to room temperature for 2-3 hours or until nicely proofed.
11. Preheat oven at 300°F/150°C for one hour
12. Let cool. Invert and brush with butter
13. Sprinkle with powdered sugar.

Be sinful and enjoy!

Macrina's Kugelhopf goes to goes to Susan's goes to Susan's Wild Yeast Blog for this week's issue of Yeastspotting.

Brioche Tatin

Not everybody is a chocoholic (I know I am not, even though I do enjoy a piece of dark chocolate once in a while) but I don't know anybody who doesn't love caramel and now that I have learned to make it the dry way (check out this post for a description of the method), I plan to make it much more often. I had two-day-old brioches on hand (that's actually what gave me the idea to make this dessert) but challah would work just as well or even slices of whole-grain pan bread which might have dried out a bit. Pan d'oro would be divine of course, but I can't imagine ever having stale pan d'oro lying around...

Add one or two apples and some sugar and you are all set for a very delicious and very romantic dessert. All things considered, why not say it with apples, this Valentine's Day? I know I will. But then I'll say it with chocolate too. Better be safe than sorry... ;-) I didn't weigh anything but here is what I used: 2 individual brioches, slightly dried out 1 and a half Golden Delicious apple 1 tbsp of butter (for the pan) 1.5 tbsp of dark brown sugar 6 tsp of granulated sugar After preheating the oven to 450 F, I peeled and sliced the apples thinly, buttered a 9" tart pan and dusted it with brown sugar before arranging the apple slices in a pinwheel on the bottom, then I set the tart pan in the oven for 10 minutes. While the apples were starting to bake, I sliced the brioches (not too thick not too thin, about 1 cm is fine) and set a small saucepan with a heavy bottom to heat on the stove. When it started smoking, I threw in one teaspoon of granulated sugar. It melted very fast, so I added a second teaspoonful and swirled the saucepan some. I progressively added the rest of the sugar, swirling constantly, sometimes taking the saucepan off the heat to slow down the coloring. When I figured I had enough caramel, I stopped, took the pan out of the oven, drizzled the caramel over the apples and arranged the brioche slices over the whole thing. I turned the oven down to 350 F.

The pan went back in the oven for 20 more minutes. When it came out, the brioche was golden and the smell was heavenly.

All that was left to do was to flip the tart over on a plate. It was actually easier to do that I thought it would be because most of the apples remained stuck to the bottom, which made it child's play to take them out with a spatula and arrange them prettily on the waiting brioche slices. Et voilà, a brioche Tatin!

If you like, you can serve it warm with vanilla ice-cream. But you don't have to as it is delicious on its own and at room temperature. The Brioche Tatin goes to Susan, from Wild Yeast, for Yeastpotting.

Looking for a reasonably healthful holiday treat?

Well, look no further. This little brioche might just do the trick! It is rich in chocolate, dried cherries and hazelnuts but rather low on fat and sugar, completely butter-free and made with a healthy proportion of white whole wheat... To top it all, it doesn't contain a single speck of commercial yeast. What's not to like? Of course it doesn't compare to a pan d'oro but, for health reasons, who would eat (or make for that matter) a pan d'oro more than a few times a year? My family likes to munch on something chocolatey while watching the kids open their presents. This year, I think I'll make this brioche (but I'll double the proportions). The idea comes from a slim French book entitled Les Pains des Quatre-Saisons, an appealing compilation of bread recipes (sometimes with accompanying memories) contributed by readers of an organic gardening magazine. I took some liberties with the recipe to adapt it both to our taste and to the family health requirements. Ingredients (for one smallish brioche): For the dough 150 g unbleached all-purpose flour 100 g white whole wheat flour 20 g agave syrup 1 egg, beaten + 1 other, beaten as well for the wash 50 g milk (you might need more according to how thirsty your flour is), at room temperature 50 g roasted hazelnut oil (the hazelnut oil contributes nicely to the taste but, if not available, a neutral vegetable oil - not canola - will do), at room temperature (soft butter is used in the original recipe) 40 g mature white starter 1 pinch of salt For the garnish 60 g hazelnuts, roasted and skinned, chopped 50 g dried cherries, quick-soaked in warm milk and drained 50 g good quality dark chocolate chips, chopped

Method:

1. Pour the flour in a large bowl
2. Make a well in the center and pour in: milk, salt, agave syrup, egg, starter
3. Mix well, adding milk as necessary
4. When incorporated and gluten is starting to develop, progressively add the oil
5. Continue mixing until smooth and flexible (but the dough should be rather firm)
6. Ferment in a tightly covered bowl until doubled in volume (in my case, it took 12 hours @ 68ºF/20ºC)
7. When the dough is ready, preheat the oven to 400ºF/204ºC, making sure there is an empty cast-iron (or other metal) pan at the bottom and a baking stone (if available) on the middle rack
8. With a rolling pin, flatten the dough into a rectangle (0.20"/0.5 cm thick), spread the garnish on the rectangle, taking care to stay away from the edges
9. Roll the dough tight, as you would a jelly roll and pinch the ends closed
10. Shape as desired and set on a parchment-covered baking sheet, brush with the egg wash and let rise another 40 minutes inside a tightly closed plastic bag
11. Pour 1 cup of water in waiting cast-iron (or metal) pan and slide the brioche into the oven
12. Spray the oven once with water and close the door
13. After 20 minutes, rotate the brioche
14. Bake another 30 minutes and cool on wire rack.

Raisins (soaked in rum or not) could be used instead of cherries, white chocolate instead of dark and, if opting for raisins, you might want to use walnuts instead of hazelnuts and to spice up the whole thing with some cinnamon. You can also use only all-purpose flour and replace the agave syrup by sugar (which was in the original recipe). However you end up making it, enjoy!