Mongrel Brioche

Sue provided the goodies for her reading group garden party at the start of last week – chocolate cake, gluten free, of course, when two or three are gathered together, plus individual nectarine pavlovas – lucky scoffers …

A few days later there were various scraps still lurking in the fridge – egg yolks from the meringue, whipped cream, even a few squares of chocolate. The first two hinted at brioche, the third decided it was to be a sweet brioche (although not very).

Used to make chocolate brioche for the punters in the old days, but probably haven’t done so in the past decade. Did a short course with Paul Merry (panary.co.uk) about 20 years ago where he demonstrated how to shape breads that were to contain a filling. You press and stretch your dough into what you might call a topless, triangular rectangle. That is a “rectangle” where the top is narrower than the bottom – the bottom (the edge nearest you) to be approximately the length of the tin in which the dough will eventually be baked. The surface of the dough is covered by the filling – in this case, small cubes of chocolate -and then is rolled up, stretching the dough slightly away from you, like croissants, to keep it taut. Because the top gets rolled the most, by the time it reaches the bottom you should have a neat cylinder to drop in your bread tin.

So, the resulting formula was based on my brioche measurements but a bit on the approximate side (check out the brioches in in Bread Formulas/Enriched Doughs). A fresh egg was added to the three egg yolks, the cream was diluted with milk, a good squirt of honey was added to the melted butter. The salt wavered between sweet and savoury quantities.