I tried a variation on the rum raisin brioche recipe I published previously. I changed the egg/milk  ratio to have more egg and less milk; shying away from pain au lait and leaning towards real brioche. Notice the amount of liquid (milk or egg) is the same. Next time, I’ll try to go even more on the egg side. Also, I added a little bit more butter to it (10% more), actually just to make my life easier with the butter sticks available in the US.

• 1kg bread flour
• 100g sugar
• 10g active dry yeast (approximately a pack, maybe less)
• 300g milk (cold)
• 6 eggs (300g)
• 230g butter
• 18g salt
• TOTAL: 2Kg

Additional ingredients for flavors:

• Rhum
• lemon zest from 1 lemon
• 100g raisins

Make sure the butter is at room temperature, it should be like a cream. Mix flour, sugar, and yeast in a large bowl. Add milk and eggs. Add rhum and lemon zest. Mix until it forms a dough. Knead slowly during 3mins, add salt, knead for another 3 mins. Add butter all at once. knead until the butter is completely incorporated (during at least 5 mins), dough is uniform and it starts looking great. Add raisins and incorporate them to the dough. Let dough rest in a container (large enough to let the dough rise twice its original volume) for 1 hour at room temperature. Refrigerate overnight or for at least 6 hours.

Take dough out of the fridge. With the 2Kg of dough we prepared 3 different brioche shapes:

1. For the flower brioche: Cut into 7 pieces of 80g. Roll them into round balls. Place them in hexagon on a baking sheet with parchment. Cover the flower with a cake mold, to prevent dough to be in contact with air.
2. For the bâtard type: Cut 700g of dough and shape it as if you do a pain bâtard (2 folds).  Place the dough on a baking sheet with parchment. Cover with lightly floured plastic wrap to prevent the dough to be in contact with the air.
3. For tresse shape: see a future post!

Let the brioche rise between 1h to 1h15min. Paint them with egg. Bake at 375-390F without convection or 350F with convection for 20-25 minutes until the brioche becomes golden on top.

Happy New Year!