Mangeons de la brioche

When you come to France from the United States (and probably from other countries), and you taste brioche for the first time, you might wonder what all the fuss is about. I know I did. Nowadays in the U.S., you can find "real" bread — what they call pain in France — at least in the cities. Back in the 1950s and '60s in the U.S. — at least in North Carolina, where I grew up — what we called bread was a sliced loaf of slightly sweet, soft-crusted "spongecake" that didn't at all resemble either the Parisian baguette or French pain de mie (sliced sandwich bread). It was more like what is called brioche in France.

So I never understood why such a big fuss was made over brioche here. It was just bread, as far as I could tell. People here didn't make sandwiches with it — that was about the only difference I detected. Brioche was a special treat here. It was considered to be a kind of cake. That's because French pain, whether made into a baguette or a bigger loaf, included just four ingredients: flour, yeast, water, and salt. Brioche is bread with eggs, butter, and a little sugar added to the dough.

Queen Marie-Antoinette, before she went to the guillotine during the French Revolution, supposedly said, when told that the French people were suffering because of famine and couldn't even get enough bread to eat to stave off hunger, said something like: "Well, why don't they just eat cake if they can't get bread?" In French, that was "Let them eat brioche!" She didn't get it and, actually, she might never even have said that. Ten years earlier, in one of his books the writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau had told the story of a legendary princess who had said the same thing about the starving peasants of her day.

I've learned to appreciate and enjoy brioche now, since the bread we eat daily is made with just flour, water, yeast and salt. Brioche is not something that knocks your socks off the way a good French croissant can. It's too familiar to an American palate. And it's not always certain that you will find brioche in a French boulangerie (bread bakery). I don't think there's a lot of demand for it. As with pain de mie, you'd do better to place an order for it in advance rather than just assuming you could go buy some from the bakery on the spur of the moment.

That said, there are loaves and loaves of brioche available at the supermarket. Lately, I've been trying some of them, and I've found some that I think are very good. Some are not so appetizing; those have a slightly chemical taste that's fairly off-putting. One criteria for choosing a brioche is that it must be labeled as being pur beurre — made with butter, not margarine or vegetable oil. The one in my photos is a braided loaf, like a traditional Jewish challah. In fact, the main difference between challah and brioche is that the French recipe includes dairy products (butter, cream. or milk).

The situation is the same with French croissants. Look for the ones that are made with butter, not other fats. And don't assume that the croissants you find in French bakeries are really made from scratch on the premises. I just saw a documentary on television where it was claimed that fully 80% of the croissants sold in France are made from dough"manufactured" in factories  and shipped frozen to supermarkets and, yes, bakeries. That doesn't mean that brioches and croissants made from factory dough aren't good, but you can't just expect them to be delicious.

The brioche in my photos here is very good, to my taste. There's a recipe on the plastic bag it's sold in at the supermarket. I paid 3.20 euros for the loaf, which is sliced like American sandwich bread (loaves of American-style sandwich bread are also a supermarket staple in France nowadays — some are good, others not). The recipe on this package is the traditional one: it calls for flour, eggs, butter, sugar, and yeast — plus a tiny bit of rum or orange blossom essence (arôme de fleur d'oranger) for flavor. I plan to make brioche following this recipe soon.

The actual ingredients in the brioche pictured here are flour (with gluten), fresh eggs, butter (15% of the dough by weight, if I understand correctly), sourdough starter (made with flour and water), flavoring (?), yeast, and salt. Not bad. And the brioche is tasty. I'll buy it again. In her famous cookbook called Je sais cuisiner (1970), Ginette Mathiot gives a recipe for brioche rapide made with baking powder instead of yeast, and cream instead of butter. I'm not sure about that...

Another brioche I've bought recently is called brioche de Nanterre — that's a town on the western edge of the Paris metropolitan area — which I found at Intermarché once but haven't yet found again. It has less sugar and less butter in it, if my taste buds are working right. I thought it was as good as this brioche from the Vendée region, but different. It was made with all natural ingredients too. I'll keep trying to find it.

A couple of years ago, when we went and spent a week in the Vendée, on the Atlantic coast, the man who owned the gîte rural we rented for our stay gave us a loaf of Vendée brioche as a welcoming gift, but I don't have a particularly good memory of it. It's a local specialty, but I thought it was too sweet. From what I've read, brioche was probably originally made in Normandy, and two towns long famous for their brioches are Gisors and Gournay, both 40 or 50 miles north of Paris, near Rouen. Both towns are famous for their dairy cows and the butter made from their local milk.