Oh baby, look at those buns.
Weeks after Glenna and Jonathan baked their brioche, and Kate experimented with alcoholic dough, I finally got around to making my own. After deliberating with Kate (or, to be truthful, listening to her long voicemail message--which I love) I decided upon the Middle Class Brioche, as the Rich Man's scared me (80% butter?) and the Poor Man's seemed like a lame concession to guilty-minded bakers.
Given the high butterfat percentage (50%) I decided to splurge and use imported Kerry Gold butter, which is wonderfully yellow and creamy tasting. It took a fair amount of time to incorporate the softened butter into the dough, and then spreading the sticky mass onto parchment paper was challenging. My hands smelled like butter for hours! The other challenge was scraping the chilled dough off of the parchment, but this is probably due to the fact that I don't own spray oil (which Reinhardt recommends) and so my parchment was drier than the recipe called for.
The only element I tweaked was to turn the soft dough into cinnamon rolls, which Reinhardt discusses in his commentary. There's really no pastry I like better than a warm cinnamon roll (without the gook that comes on commercial rolls), and so I leaped at the chance to convert the brioche. The dough's stickiness made rolling the pastry difficult, but one bite of the golden yellow, flaky, not too sweet roll was enough to make want to go through the whole mess again. Once I digest my roll, of course, which should be in a few days.
I have to admit, I'm glad Tom and I went to the gym this morning, because these buns are intense. Even now I'm wondering about bringing the rest to our matinee because having them around the house is a waistline liability (or an incentive to work out? One should be positive about these things). This definitely isn't an everyday dough, but it is a marvelous treat.
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