02 March 2020

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.

16 comments:

  1. Well, I'm very familiar with the "brioche" you're talking about, since, when in Paris, I buy industrial so called brioche, whether from the Vendée or elsewhere. I toast two slices for my breakfast and I enjoy it. But this brioche is more like an improved pain brioché than the real brioche that is more like a cake than some kind of bread, as the one here. You should try and go to a pastry shop, not a boulanger, and ask if they make real brioches. They're usually individual small round things, the outside is generally browish and the inside very fluffy, I don't think you could slice one easily.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Here is shat Wikipedia has to say about brioche, but in no way is it some kind if bread:
      Brioche (/ˈbriːoʊʃ/, also UK: /ˈbriːɒʃ, briːˈɒʃ/,[1] US: /briːˈoʊʃ, ˈbriːɔːʃ, briːˈɔːʃ/,[2][3][4] French: [bʁijɔʃ]) is a bread of French origin that is similar to a highly enriched pastry, and whose high egg and butter content (400 grams for each kilogram of flour) give it a rich and tender crumb. Chef Joël Robuchon described it as "light and slightly puffy, more or less fine, according to the proportion of butter and eggs."[5] It has a dark, golden, and flaky crust, frequently accentuated by an egg wash applied after proofing.

      Delete
    2. The fundamental problem here is that the English word "bread" does not mean at all the same thing as the French word pain. Otherwise, we wouldn't in English have need for the term "French bread" to describe pain. And we wouldn't have things like zucchini bread and banana bread, which are sweet and would be called cake [keck] in French. What's the difference between pound cake (quatre-quarts) and brioche in French. Are both cakes? Brioche is much more like bread, I think. It's especially like American bread.

      Delete
    3. By the way, we don't have pastry shops here in the Saint-Aignan area. We have boulangeries, c'est tout. Times have changed. There was one pâtisserie in Saint-Aignan back in 2003-2006, but it closed down more than a decade ago.

      Delete
    4. Yes, I fell into the trap of faux amis. Of course, for French people, banana bread is no bread at all. but as you said, a cake. But could banana bread be considered a cake in English?

      Delete
    5. About the only thing called a cake that's baked in a loaf pan — ironically called un moule à cake in France — is a pound cake. Otherwise, with few exceptions, such baked goods are called loaves (meatloaf) or breads (banana bread). They are usually "quick breads" leavened with baking powder or baking soda. See this site for examples. Some true breads, yeast-leavened, including brioche and pain de mie (British bread), are also made in loaf pans.

      Delete
    6. As I said above, the very light texture of the true brioche, as I can remember it, was closer to that of croissant than of bread, not as dense as the Vendée one. Probably the proportions of flour versus the other ingredients was différent.

      Delete
  2. Very interesting. I love getting to read the packaging of they food products you buy, too.

    ReplyDelete
  3. This brioche conversation is interesting...fresh baked brioche has become pretty standard for hamburger buns in better restaurants here. Maybe it's a less-sugared variety than what you get in France. As for those banana breads and zucchini breads, to me those were things that came about in the 70s US popular culture, in an effort to dress up easy recipes as something healthy with a vegetable and the word bread.

    Agree with Judy, reading the ingredients is interesting...one knows what they all are, as opposed to American products which generally have some things you have no idea what they are, lol.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. A lot of hamburger buns here are made with "brioche bread" — pain brioché — which is not as sweet and not as buttery as true brioche.

      Delete
  4. I grew up eating rye bread which is what my parents preferred and now usually rye bread or "Italian" bread which is nothing like bread I've had in Italy. I don't think I really know real brioche or see it for sale around here. One of your photos looked quite a lot like challah which I sometimes see in the stores here. It has egg in it which brioche also has, but apparently no dairy.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. When we lived in Washington DC in the '80s and in San Francisco in the '90s, we were lucky to be able to get good French-style bread. I don't remember having brioche in those places, however.

      Delete
  5. Vous qui êtes de fins cuisiniers... quoi ? vous ne faites pas votre brioche vous-même ?
    Il en existe de nombreuses recettes pas si difficiles... vous faites bien votre pain de mie 😉

    ReplyDelete
  6. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Douleur ? Je ne vois pas.

      Voici un blog où on trouve une petite histoire de la brioche en France. Ça cafouille un peu mais on arrive à déchiffrer...

      Delete

What's on your mind? Qu'avez-vous à me dire ?