Technically, Marie Antoinette said, “Let them eat brioche.” Which is NOT cake. It’s bread. But it’s really rich, delicious bread…

Now that you have your Ginger Crème Pâtissière chilling in the fridge, let’s make some brioche dough to put it in.

 

This is my version of brioche, inspired by a combination Rose Levy Beranbaum recipes, and Jeff Hertzberg and Xoë François’ techniques. I streamlined some of the time intensive aspects of traditional recipes, but kept the buttery and cake like taste. This is absolutely the EASIEST brioche you will make.

This makes four loaves of brioche, which can be frozen for later use, but you can easily halve or quarter the recipe for less. You’ll need one large plastic tupperware (about 8 quarts if you make the full recipe) with a lid.

Ingredients:

• 1 ½ cups water (room temperature)
• 1 Tablespoon active yeast
• 8 large eggs
• 1/3 cup honey
• 2 Tablespoons sugar
• 1 ½ cups melted butter
• 1 pound, 2 oz. pastry flour (3 ¼ cups)
• 1 pound, 3 oz. all-purpose, unbleached flour (3 ¼ cups), not pictured
• 1 Tablespoon salt

 

Combine the water, yeast, eggs, honey, sugar, and butter in the tupperware and let it sit for 15 minutes to activate the yeast.

Then add the flour and salt

and mix with a wooden spoon until you get a wet dough that looks like this:

Seal the tupperware and let it sit on your counter at room temperature for two hours, until it doubles in size.

Throw it in the fridge until tomorrow…

…you are gonna like what’s coming.

 

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*this dough must be chilled before using and is even better after a day or two of resting. The flavors develop quite nicely in the cold and the dough is much easier to work with.