Back to brioche — and butter content

Yesterday I went out on a brioche hunt and excursion. I had kept thinking about what CHM said about finding brioche in a pastry shop — une pâtisserie — rather than a bread bakery — une boulangerie — to get brioches that less resemble breads and are more cake-like. The place I had in mind was a bakery in the village of Lye [lee], which is only 15 minutes east of Saint-Aignan by car.

The Lye bakery is one I've gone to for bread several times on the way to or back from the bigger town of Valençay, and it seems to be the one around here that makes and sells the most complete range of breads and pastries. For example, I've seen (but not bought) pain de mie there, while in most bakeries that's something you don't always find. It's a "hybrid" shop and called a boulangerie-pâtisserie (as are many of the bakeries around Saint-Aignan), but focused more on breads than pastries.

As so often happens here in rural France, when I got to Lye I found the bakery shut up tight. The big metal shutter was pulled down, and there was a hand-written sign taped to it. I didn't stop to read the sign, and I hope that the bakery is just closed temporarily, not permanently. It didn't matter all that much yesterday, because I was on my way to Valençay anyway. I wanted a couple of things from the Intermarché over there, including, if I could find one, a loaf of brioche de Nanterre like the one I enjoyed a couple of weeks ago but haven't found again.

To make a long story short — something you might have noticed I'm not very good at — there I was in Lye, four miles from Valençay, at 8:30 a.m. I wasn't sure what time the Intermarché store would open its doors, but probably not before 9. I happen to know that there are at least two bakeries in Valençay, so I thought I'd go see what they had for sale. I needed bread anyway. At the first one, near the famous château de Valençay, what did I find but little individual brioches in the Paris style:-They're little crown-shaped cakes with a "head" — a little knob of the same dough stuck on top (see photo above).

I got four of those, two baguettes (above), and a croissant for the road, and then I headed for Intermarché. It was still not even 9 o'clock, and when I drove into the parking lot there I saw no cars there at all. But there was a big sign listing the store's opening and closing times on different days of the week — very complicated as such schedules can be only in France — and I saw that on Wednesdays the store opened at 9:15. Oh well. That would give me time to go and check out the second bakery in Valençay, which is nearby. And I'm glad I did.

The second bakery was very atmospheric. It was open for business, but appeared dimly lit because the windows were completely steamed up with condensation. It was cold outside, and I guess the oven in the back room of the bakery was producing a lot of steam, which was condensing on the big plate-glass window. The first thing I saw was four or five huge, tall, brown breads or cakes of some kind standing on a tray on top of the pastry counter. As you can see from the photos here, they looked almost like pieces of stove pipe, but with a swirl pattern  in the pastry (see below).

And there was a hand-written sign next to them. Brioche feuilletée. 4,50 €. Wow. Just what I was looking for. A woman came into the shop from the back room, greeted me cheerfully, and asked how she could help me. I'll have one of those brioches, I told her.

Then I noticed a bread that the sign said was called a marguerite and asked for one of those too. Marguerite [mahr-guh-REET] means "daisy" — you can see from my photo why it's called that. It actually looks like a pan of American dinner rolls.

Anyway, one more thing: CHM said in a comment a couple of days ago that the brioche he remembers has more or less that same texture as a croissant. It's not really like bread (even though the brioche made in the Vendée is very bread-like, in American terms). I happen to have in my collection of cookbooks a two-volume set called Jacques Pépin's The Art of Cooking (1988). I was looking at those books the other day to see if Pépin includes a recipe for brioche. Among other things, I read the following in his segment on making croissants, pains au chocolat, and brioche: "Croissant dough is a cross between puff paste [pâte feuilletée in French] and brioche. It's a flaky dough that is rolled and folded like puff paste but contains yeast." That's confirmation of the similarity of true brioche to croissants mentioned by CHM.

However, Pépin writes about brioches that they are "buttery, light breads [not cakes] made from moist yeast dough." His brioche is made with a generous pound of flour, a pound of unsalted butter, five large eggs, and two egg yolks, plus yeast and salt. It's rich. Meanwhile, the 1967 edition of the Larousse Gastronomique food encyclopedia gives different recipes for the true brioche called brioche mousseline, which it describes as un gâteau levée (a leavened cake), as well as for brioche commune and brioche ordinaire. All three varieties start with 500 grams of flour, but the amount of butter is very different. The dough for brioche mousseline contains 400 grams of butter and six eggs; for brioche commune, 250 grams of butter and six eggs; and for brioche commune, 200 grams of butter and just four eggs. That's a lot more butter than they put in the loaves of bread-like brioche vendéenne sold in supermarkets. Look closely at the toasted slice of brioche feuilletée and you can see the melted butter that has oozed out of it. It makes good toast that you don't need to butter — just serve with confiture.

Today is my birthday, and I guess brioche will be my birthday cake. Unless Walt decided to make a cake while the blanquette de veau I'm preparing for my birthday lunch simmers on the stove.