Bread Machine Brioche

I’ve been making a lot of this, and the hostess of the last party I brought it to asked for the recipe, so since I’m typing it in anyway, here it is for my faithful blog readers:

It’s from the book that came with the Cuisinart bread machine, which died after 5 months, but the book is much better than the one that came with my shiny new cheap one from Amazon.

Makes 2 pounds of dough.

* 1/2 cup milk (I use rice milk)
* 4 eggs, large, at room temperature (I’m not fussy about the temperature)
* 1 stick unsalted butter (there really isn’t any reason to buy salted if you keep what you’re not using in the freezer)
* 2 tablespoons granulated sugar
* 2 tablespoons powdered milk (I actually use soy protein drink mix that I bought a large container of once and then didn’t like drinking it.)
* 1 1/2 teaspoons salt
* 3 3/4 cups bread flour (It really makes a difference using bread flour over all-purpose)
* 3 teaspoons yeast

Run the bread machine on the dough cycle. At this point you have a beautiful hunk of dough that’s elastic, not at all sticky and smells wonderful. The standard brioche where you roll a ball and then put a smaller ball on top of it must have happened because people just wanted to play with this dough. I’ve been using a mini-muffin pan with 24 small cups. Have the larger ball just fill the cup and the smaller ball perch on top of it.

You can also roll it out as thin as practical (less than an inch) and cut 3-4 inch circles and bake it on a cookie sheet for hamburger buns.

In either case, you get a better color on the result if you brush the rolls with an egg wash of one egg beated with one tablespoon of water.

Let rise for about half an hour after you’ve formed the rolls. Bake in a 350 degree (Fahrenheit) oven until the bottoms are browned. For the mini-muffin size this will be less than 20 minutes.