Grant Crilly is the Executive Director and cofounder of ChefSteps. Grant is a classically trained chef and, prior to ChefSteps, he worked on the award-winning cookbook series Modernist Cuisine and cooked at various restaurants, including L’Astrance in Paris, Busaba in Mumbai, and Mistral Kitchen in Seattle.

Grant Crilly

Brioche is a soft, buttery bread that is rich enough to be considered a yeast-risen cake. In fact, when Marie Antoinette (supposedly) said “Let them eat cake,” she was actually referring to brioche. Our recipe is rather lean by Parisian standards: we use about 50 percent butter relative to the weight of the bread flour, whereas many recipes use as much as 75 percent butter, and a few artisan formulas are equal parts flour and butter. Our baking times are for miniature loaves of brioche baked in our oven. Making larger loaves, using a different oven, or baking at high altitude will change the required baking time. But you can easily overcome these challenges and bake the perfect loaf of brioche by following this advice:First, use a two-part baking step. The initial high-temperature step ensures good oven-spring, which swells the volume of the loaf before the crust begins to set. Once the crust begins to set, lower your oven temperature to avoid charring. Continue to bake until the crumb has set. For our loaves, in our oven, this takes 30 to 40 minutes. The easiest way to know when the crumb has set is to measure the core temperature with a digital thermometer. Professional bakers like Peter Reinhart will tell you that for rich, soft breads like brioche you should target an internal temperature of [c 85] to [c 88], which is the point at which starch in the dough has gelatinized.If you bake loaves to this temperature, as they cool the starch will become firm enough to support the weight of the bread. The bubble walls in the bread will also have ruptured, changing the bread from a closed-cell foam into an open-cell lattice. This is important because as steam inside a cooling loaf condenses, the loaf must draw air in to fill the bubbles; otherwise, it will collapse. This open-cell structure is also responsible for the hollow sound that a properly cooked loaf of bread will make when tapped on the bottom. You can apply this temperature-measuring technique to other styles of bread. The only difference is that for lean, crusty breads, the target temperature is higher, between [c 95] and [c 98].

Mini Brioche