Brioche Rolls

With a rare free weekend I decided it was time to tackle something a bit more tricky and a little less cakey. I decided upon Lorraine Pascale’s Brioche Rolls. I like brioche bread and the instructions ran to two pages!

Method

First, lots (6!) eggs are beaten into flour, yeast and sugar. I used my electric mixer with the dough hooks. Then quite a lot of butter is mixed into the dough, gradually in several lots. As the instructions say this is one of those recipes where it you don’t panic when it looks horrible, keep mixing and it’ll get there and it did. Once it was done the dough was a lovely and soft and smooth.

The dough is then separated and made into the roll shapes. I used my big muffin tin to mould them into. The rolls have a little bobble on top; a bit like a cottage loaf. Then they were left to rise for several hours. The warm weather we’ve been having lately means that I didn’t have to put them anywhere special, just on the kitchen counter!

After the rolls had risen they were washed with a little egg and placed in the oven to bake.

I put half the dough away in the freezer to bake at another time.

Results

My first, and really stupid, mistake was that I had bought salted butter. I’m not even sure why salted butter exists. I missed out the extra salt in the recipe and hoped that it would be ok. The taste wasn’t great and rolls were pretty salty. In some ways it kind of worked, a bit like where you get salty and sweet popcorn in the same bag.

The mixing process would have been a lot easier if I had a stand mixer. The dough was really tough and needed a lot of mixing – it was a good arm workout!

I think the rolls were in the oven for a little too long. The outside was possibly a little too brown and inside was not as soft as the brioche that you get in the shops. Presentation wise my rolls were definitely not as petit or neat as Lorraine’s. But they looked good in a big and chunky rustic kind of way. I’ll have to see if I can get the freezer batch in a better way.

Score: 5/10