Category Archives: Mellow Bakers

Jeffrey Hamelman’s Brioche

I was saving this one up for the end of the month as I had a birthday and I thought a birthday brioche would be just the thing. That, and a lovely outing with my family for dim sum made for a fine celebration.

All the other Mellow Bakers who have made this one have enjoyed it. Pop over to the board to read their posts here. The recipe has been written up on several of their blogs, here is Zorra’s lovely chocolate filled brioche, Cathy’s great step-by-step post and Lien’s cute chicken baby brioches amongst many others. I’ve added my ‘numbers’ and brief instructions at the end of the post, though you really need the book for all the detail.

brioche I had two goes this month at making the brioche. I got in a complete muddle about the yeast and the columns, not helped by the fact that there is an error in one of the columns, which I knew about, but then managed to forget by the time I came back to make the brioche the second time.

For those of you who have not seen this book, each recipe is laid out with three different sets of weights and measures. The first, on the industrial scale is in pounds, the second (Metric) on a small bakery scale is in kilos, the third set is the Home set, and is in ounces and cups and teaspoons. Three different sets, all giving you a different final dough weight and there are errors in several of the recipes. Most of these have been picked up and annotated and there is a pdf of the errata sheet available here. I find the layout of this book challenging, even after baking from it now for several months.

The first time I made the Hamelman brioche, I made a very small quantity, I used the Metric column and divided by 10%. The first lot I made took forever to rise, I got into a muddle about the yeast quantities and I think I used too little. I used the instant yeast, chilled everything, mixed the dough, put it in the fridge overnight and then made little balls and put them in tall muffin cases, originally used for mini panetonnes last year. The finished balls were light and airy, but didn’t fill the cases and though delicious looked a bit like muffins.

Last weekend I made the dough again, this time using fresh yeast from a local bakers and converting the Home column to grams. I had forgotten about the errata. So one way I ended up with 13 grams of yeast, but then when I checked it against the Baker’s Percentage table I ended up with 34 grams of yeast. Hmmm…. I checked with the other Mellow Bakers about converting from instant yeast to fresh yeast and in a complete crisis of confidence, emailed King Arthur Flour and asked them too. Everyone confirmed that they use a conversion ratio of 1:3 and that I was on the right track. Robyn solved the mystery of the two sets of numbers by kindly reminding me that there was a mistake in the Home column. There are great advantages to having a friendly forum to go to for help and advice!

The Kenwood liked having a full load of dough to work with, and mixed away purposefully. I stopped every now and then and attempted to sheet the dough, i.e. hold a blob by the corners and see if you can let it stretch gently out into a smooth sheet of dough. After twenty minutes of mixing, I decided it was good to go, I could see the strands of gluten and it looked smooth and shiny and to be honest, I had had enough by that point. An hour at room temperature, it shot to the top of the bowl. I degassed it furiously, it was alive with hissing bubbles – that fresh yeast! – and put it in the fridge to calm down overnight.

Second time around I was determined to use the brioche moulds I had picked up ages ago. I have looked at loads of instructions for shaping brioche a tete but I wasn’t very good at it. I am not very keen on working with the dough even when chilled. I can’t quite explain why, but I find it difficult to shape. I tried to roll out a strand, to make into a twist and it just wouldn’t roll out for me. I worried that if I overhandled it the butter would start to melt and the dough would get oily, so I went back to making what I hoped would work – my brioche shapes are best described as characterful! They reminded me of cottage loaves by the time they came out, leaning here there and everywhere.

The pay off: the aroma of brioche baking on a chilly weekend morning has got to be one of the best things ever! Warm brioche, soft apricot jam, a little sunshine – Zeb agreed, reminding me of his French origins. We loved this bread; its butter content means that it can’t be an everyday bread, but for holidays or special days or treats, it’s worth doing, life as a home baker wouldn’t be complete without a brioche once in a while.

In conclusion, I hope I haven’t given a bad impression of making this. It is in fact relatively straight forward if you follow the instructions. Chill all the ingredients, chill the water, chill the mixing bowl. Mix for the right length of time. Leave the dough over night, shape and bake. Just make sure you have your ingredients all weighed out correctly first and read the whole recipe through. I’ve got the hang of it now!

And always, but always, serve it warm. Cold brioche, like cold croissants, just isn’t right.

brioche

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My version of this brioche (adapted ever so slightly from Bread by Jeffrey Hamelman)

520 g bread flour
160 g high gluten/very strong bread flour
7 little cold eggs making 340 grams
60 g chilled water
11 g salt (less than stated in the original)
82 g sugar
340 g chilled butter, softened with a rolling pin, but still cold when added to the dough
34 g fresh yeast

Method:

Chill everything, even the mixing bowl. If you are using your hands to mix, regularly cool them down.

Mix everything apart from the butter for at least 5 – 7 minutes. You will get a very firm dough. The eggs must be completely incorporated. I mixed the water, eggs, sugar and yeast together first and then added the flours and the salt.

Then you add the chilled butter, piece by piece, and knead/mix till you have a smooth satiny dough, it takes forever and in theory you should be able to hold a piece up gently by the corners and watch it ‘sheet’.

When you are happy with the development of the dough, tuck some clingflim over the top, so no air can get in, leave for an hour at room temperature. Degas after an hour and put it in the fridge overnight. If you remember, degas it again a couple of times while it is in the fridge.

Shape the following day, and allow to almost double in size before applying eggwash to the top. I baked mine at 195 C. The four loaves took approx 30 minutes to bake. Cool on a rack for at least a minute before EATING!

I’ve just had to correct this as I left out the sugar, I blame Brydie’s Nana!

Country Bread – Hamelman Style

country bread hamelman Country Bread is my second bread this November for Mellow Bakers. The others are the Horst Bandel rye bread and a brioche which I am saving for the end of the month.

If you want to join in with this escapade, you can get advice, give advice, and talk bread in general on the Mellow Bakers forum. We’re very nice and friendly, jump in at any time, bake any of the breads you fancy, either one for this month or a previous one. Then post on a blog or on the forum direct. You can upload pics if you feel like it. And if you need cheering up, you can always visit the bread disaster thread too and see my very first loaves.

The Country Bread is a plain dough made with white bread flour, water, yeast and salt.There are no enrichments, no milk to sweeten and soften the crumb, no butter or oil to coat the gluten strands, no egg, no malts.

The recipe uses a paté fermentée, as we have done previously when making Rustic Bread, or for pizza. I quite like using old dough in new dough usually but on this occasion I wasn’t that excited by it if I’m honest, the difference between this bread and the Rustic Bread is gigantic.

One of those wet and sticky doughs...

Tiny amounts of yeast, long prefermentation of half the flour in the final dough, fairly wet, quite a lot wetter than the doughs we have been making up to now. Needs lots of stretches and folds to bring it under control and I suspect the temperature control is fairly important too otherwise your timings go way off. Drop the dough temperature by four degrees and your proof time will need to be extended and so on.

I used my local supermarket, Waitrose Organic strong bread flour for this bread. You need something with a reasonably good gluten level to cope with the long prove time.

The loaves I made here are certainly good enough to eat, but in a way they remind me of loaves I made when I started out. They stuck a little in the banettons, probably because I dusted them with wheat flour and not rye flour and they spread a lot when I inverted them onto the peel, the knife dragged when I slashed them so I knew they weren’t going to open up properly. They recovered fairly well in the oven; the Angel of Spring doing her thing as always.

If this had been one of the first breads I had made I would be really pleased with this – but I know I can make better tasting bread than this. So before anyone says, oh they look fine, I agree! Yes they do look fine and rustic and all that sort of thing, I am not complaining, just telling you how it tastes from where I am, the photos don’t tell the whole story after all and sometimes the photos make the breads look better than they really are.

Great texture, shame about the flavour

Taste wise:- This is a bland bread with a good open crumb, irregular holes and a chewy crust. Maybe it needs a little more salt, maybe I should have added some of my sourdough starter to it to give it some flavour, it needs something, the long pre-ferment didn’t do anything for it tastewise.

The biggest effect of the long pre-ferment and proves is on the texture of the bread, which is very similar to what one get with a white sourdough. So if you want a bread with the open, slightly chewy texture of a typical sourdough but a very mild flavour this is the one for you. It’s not the one for me. If I’m going to spend that much time monitoring a dough, stretching and folding and so on, I want to get great bread, not just a good enough bread.

… Looking forward to making that brioche, a few quick marches to burn off the calories first…..

Westphalian Pumpernickel by Post

Bread all over the place

Here is the current crop of breads at home spread out in the watery November sunshine between showers of rain.

From back to front:

Dan Lepard’s delicate milk loaf, good for toast, holding poached eggs and Brian’s favourite white bread.

A 7 seeded bread from Marks Bread in Bedminster. I’m working my way through his breads to see what they are all like. This is one is a nice, nutty seedy bread.

My Horst Bandel rye bread – you’ve met before!

Westphalian Pumpernickel kindly sent to me by Ulrike who is a Mellow Baking friend for me to compare with the Horst Bandel rye bread.

I eat them all but Brian will only eat the first two and he is not too sure about the seeds, though he will eat rye bread if it has caraway in. So I couldn’t ask anyone else’s opinion here. I am not particularly good at describing tastes but I will give it a shot…

Taste test

What's in the Westphalian Pumpernickel?

Pumpernickel to a German bread eater means exactly this bread, dark and sweet, soft and dense, made only of very coarse ground rye (meal or Schrot), molasses, malted rye,* water, salt and yeast and baked for a very long time indeed. Looking at this bread it is quite distinctive and it has a unique texture and taste.

At a guess it doesn’t include whole grains soaked and boiled like the Jeffrey Hamelman bread.

Pumpernickel close up

Taste wise I am biased towards my own breads. I think that’s because I am used to them. My version of the Jeffrey Hamelman recipe is more chewy and grainy and it has a sourer taste too, which might be down to the long second prove it had this time round. It is not as sweet as the traditional pumpernickel, but then it only baked for about 5 hours as opposed to 20! My bread reminds me of the Danish and German Vollkorn breads more with its paler colour and chunkier texture.

What’s really interesting is I just Googled to see what was available here and look here is an export Pumpernickel from the same German company with an English label which is slightly different. It doesn’t mention molasses and has slightly less rye content. Do you think it has been ‘tweaked’ for the English market? I know all manner of products are changed slightly to make them more acceptable when they travel abroad, it looks as if pumpernickel does that too.

I have a similar reaction to Ulrike’s when I come across bright orange plastic cheese called Cheddar in, say, a Canadian supermarket. But apparently my Cheddar is only one sort of Cheddar, my sort has a special title ‘West Country Farmhouse Cheddar’ . OK, I didn’t know that, thanks Wiki! I suspect that not many people outside the food production world know that certain names are protected or have to be phrased in a particular way. Cheddar is just another word for a medium hard cheese to most people.(My favourite Cheddar ever by the way is made by Keens with unpasteurized milk.)

A little Keens Cheddar on Beer Bread

Only cheese produced and sourced in the English counties of Somerset, Devon, Dorset, and Cornwall may be given the Protected Designation of Origin name “West Country Farmhouse Cheddar”.^[3]

Maybe they should do the same for Westphalian Pumpernickel? I am sure it would count as a TSG if not a PGS. You can find out more about this complex area of protected names here on Wikipedia. I looked up Pumpernickel on the DOOR database but I couldn’t find it, though I did find Nurnberger Lebkuchen !

Do you have a treasured foodstuff that has been changed completely in its travels across the world?