Brioche Feuilleté at King Arthur Flour

As promised, here is another entry about my advanced baking class at King Arthur Flour.  In keeping with my previous post about brioche, I thought I’d show you another item that we baked, something that is not common in this country:  Brioche Feuilleté.

If you don’t eat butter, read no further.  Brioche Feuilleté has a LOT of butter.  Did I mention butter?

Speaking of butter, here is one of my favorite Saturday Night Live skits:

Actually , we made three mouthwatering breads with the brioche dough:  brioche feuilleté, coffeecake, and bienenstich (bee sting).  Today I’ll talk about brioche feuilleté, and save the other two for another day.  Soon, I promise.

Brioche Feuilleté

Well, what can you say about taking brioche dough, which is loaded with butter, and laminating it (like puff pastry) with MORE butter?  Yum.  Pass it on down.

Chef Hamelman (his book is one of my favorites: Bread: A Baker’s Book of Techniques and Recipes)  first learned to make this at his first baking job about 34 years ago from a French baker.  Basically, you roll out the brioche dough, and incorporate butter into it by folding, similar to the way you would make danish dough or puff pastry dough – that’s the “feuilleté” part. Here is the brioche dough before the lamination process, which I didn’t get pictures of because I was too busy:

In the photo above , we are cutting and weighing dough portions.  Once that is done we divided our dough into three equal portions and rolled them out:

Brush the top edge of each strip THINLY with egg wash, and then pipe the filling in a thin strip near the bottom edge.

The filling was a mixture of ground hazelnuts, puff pastry crumbs (you can even use old bread crumbs), simple syrup, and egg whites.  Roll each strip closed, pinching the bottom seam if you have to.

Keeping the seam side down, braid the three strips together and place in a standard loaf pan, brush with egg wash, and let rise until puffy.  Then bake until it’s a rich, deep brown and the sides are firm.  Baking temperature is about 350 F, but no higher than 375 F.

When the loaves were done, we brushed them with an apricot glaze, which I could have eaten straight out of the pot, and then Chef Hamelman drizzled a fondant glaze over the loaves.

This was so good, I was practically beside myself.  The aroma was incredible.  Buttery, fluffy brioche with little pockets of sweet nuts from the filling.  Amazing.  Its even good when it’s stale – just toast it.  You can even top it with more butter, if you dare!

This post has been Yeastspotted!