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Sourdough Bubble-Top Brioche
Brioche is a delicious pastry bread from France, where it’s categorized as viennoiserie, which actually means “things from Vienna.”
Whether French or Austrian in origin, brioche is now known worldwide, and it’s a fun and useful bread to learn to make. Brioche can be formed into many different shapes and it’s the base dough for countless filled, twisted and braided treats.
Recipe Development
Ironically, brioche has a light tender crumb due to large amounts of “heavy” ingredients: eggs and butter. The percentage of butter relative to flour in brioche ranges widely, from 20-90%. In The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, Peter Reinhart explains that in France in centuries past, the amount of butter in a family’s brioche was an indicator of their wealth.
Butter is likely still the most expensive ingredient in brioche, but for home bakers, experience with handling and fermenting enriched dough is also a consideration in choosing the amount of butter to use.
This recipe is an indulgent but manageable 50% butter (relative to flour weight). This recipe is also naturally leavened and part whole-grain flour. I used Ethiopian blue tinge emmer wheat, but you can use a different whole grain if you prefer.
I adapted this recipe from a brioche recipe in Baking School: The Bread Ahead Cookbook. In converting the recipe from yeast to sourdough, I pulled some of the flour and water from the yeast dough recipe and put it in the sweet stiff starter. However, I made the sugar in the sweet stiff starter be additional to the sugar in the original yeast dough recipe, because my first batch did not increase the sugar, and it lacked even a hint of sweetness.
Shaping
Brioche dough can be rolled into loaves and buns, braided, made into scrolls, or shaped in the traditional brioche à tête — a fluted shape with a ball on top. Through Pinterest I eventually landed on something I hadn’t seen before, bubble-top brioche, which is comprised of three balls proofed together..
This shape is fancier than a bun but doesn’t demand much finesse. You simply need to roll a lot of balls — 36 for a batch of twelve brioches. Plus, bubble-top brioches conveniently bake up in a cupcake pan, which most people already own.
Dough Development
I prefer to hand mix this dough even though it only weighs about 1100g and can fit in a typical stand mixer. Mostly I’m used to hand kneading double batches of @easummers’s leaner brioche recipe here. Also, though, hand kneading allows me to start with cold butter if I forget to bring the butter to room temperature, and I think I get a good sense of the dough’s development this way. You absolutely can make this dough in a stand mixer if that is what you prefer. Simply bring your butter to room temperature. The mixing times are about the same.
After the initial mix of all ingredients except the butter, I use the heat of my hands to squeeze and smear the butter into the dough in two stages. Then I continue to develop the gluten with an almost churning motion that you can see in this video.
Sourdough Bubble-Top Brioche
Sourdough bubble-top brioche looks fancy, tastes spectacular and isn't difficult to make. The small amount of whole grain wheat in this recipe boosts fermentation and flavor, and the crumb remains feathery soft. These brioches stay fresh for days and reheat well -- if you can make them last.
Ingredients
Sweet Stiff Starter (175g)
Dough
Instructions
Mixing
Bulk Fermentation
Shaping
Final Proof
Baking
Shopping List
Sourdough Bubble-Top Brioche