June 2, 2009 - 11:29am
Brioche question
I need to know the approximate amount of brioche dough that is appropriate for my fluted brioche mold. The mold is about 3" high with a bottom diameter of about 3". The liquid capacity is about 5 & 3/4 cups.
I'm participating in The BBA Challenge
We are a group of home bakers with a crazy goal in mind: to attempt every single recipe in Peter Reinhart’s book, The Bread Baker’s Apprentice: Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread.
Reinhart's brioche recipe makes 2 pounds of dough; I want to scale down the recipe ingredients so I only make one loaf using the brioche mold I own (and have never used!).
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I'm just taking a stab at this, but I made my brioche last week for the challenge, and I made a half recipe of the Rich Man's version, and it made 12 nice sized brioches a tete for me. I'm guessing you're considering either Middle Class or Poor Man's versions, since you said the final dough was about 2lbs? PR actually says at the top of each class that it makes 2-4 large brioches a tete, and your mold sounds like it's going to be the size of the smaller, large size? (did that make any sense?) So if you make a 1/4 recipe, it should work for your mold?
Granted, it's much easier to halve a recipe, and I'd actually recommend that since you're going to the trouble of making it anyway :) Fill the brioche mold about halfway, to allow room for proofing. If you have extra dough, you can always bake it in muffin tins (won't have fluted edges) and it'll still come out nice. I didn't feel like splurging on the molds so I just did mine in a muffin tin. Anyone else, please feel free to tackle this
Sephie
I plan to make the Middle Class brioche dough and shape it as a brioche a tete. This bread, baked in a brioche mold that looks similar to the one I own, is pictured in Reinhart's book on pg 123.
On pg 127, in the recipe for Middle Class brioche, Reinhart says that the recipe makes 2 to 4 large brioches a tete OR two 1-pound loaves.
I actually broke down, joined twitter, and posted this question to the #BBA topic - a suggested response was to make 8 OZ of dough. This seems too little to me.
It seems to me that I should scale the recipe down to about 1 pound (raw) dough. I would like to know if that seems a reasonable amount of dough to make, given that I would like to have sufficient dough to fill the brioche mold I own but not have extra dough left over.
PS =============
I'm very comfortable with baker's math but I would appreciate some estimate of the amount of dough to make given the recipe and the dimensions of the one brioche mold I happen to own
PPS =============
Thanks to sephiepoo for your response
I was the Twit who suggested 8 ounces of dough. I have a 6 1/2-inch brioche mold, and one pound of dough fit it perfectly. So I think that would be too much for your 3-inch mold. My 2 1/2-inch molds held 2 1/2 ounces, but probably could have taken a little more. That's why I think 8 ounces would be about right. I do agree, however, that it would be easier to scale the recipe to one pound and use the extra dough (remember to only fill the mold halfway) for a small boule, muffins, free-form rolls, etc.
If my math is correct you have about 80 cubic inches in the brioche mold so a quantity of finished dough amounting to a single loaf of the BBA Brioche recipe should work nicely in that mold
Following the recommendations, I'm going to scale down Reinhart's recipe for "Middle Class" brioche to about 16 oz dough. If I have extra dough, so be it.
Thanks especially to gaarp - you do realize that I have no idea how to measure a fluted brioche pan, right? It is possibly 7" on top. but 3" on the bottom.
This will be truly a challenge for me and I am looking forward to it, albeit with some trepidation.
Thanks again to all of you - SF
Sherry Yard's book, "The Secrets of Baking" has a table on page 233 with how many brioche molds of different sizes you need for 2, 2.5, and 3 lbs. of dough. She gives the mold size in inches which I take to be the diameter of the top. That assumption has worked out for me so far.
Here are the number of molds for 2 lbs. of lean brioche dough that she gives for several sizes:
3" - 21, 3.5 - 16, 4" - 11, 5.5" - 8, 6.5" - 4, 7" - 3, 8" - 2
When I use these they work fine, but I find I could probably put more dough in each mold (i.e. use fewer molds) than she recommends.