This last weekend I finished reading Julia Childs 'My life in France', a partially autobiographical book about her escapades in cooking. My son bought it to kill time after a cancelled flight back to the UK. Good old BA, he'd finished it by the time he arrived. Anyway, she writes quite well and tempted me to get hold of her cookbook... which I haven't. As an interim I asked Google about Brioche, though why I picked that out I really don't know. She mentions in her book that she found quite a few variants on the recipe and that's exactly what I found. I did find a CBS video with Julia in it, though it appears she is a spectator rather than the recipes author. Anyway, I decided to have a go.

This is the result. Half the dough mix (the rest is in the fridge waiting inspiration). I wanted to start plain, as that was the abiding memory of brioche in France. Most recipes utilise the mix as a container or wrapper, or decorate it with sugars and nuts.

The problems started with metrics. I'm no cook and converting from cups and sticks to Imperial or Metric was the first hurdle. The yeast suddenly becomes a sponge? What? That's a cake isn't it? The UK 'clingfilm' is transported into 'Saran wrap'. I had that as a poisen used in Japans metro system by terrorists. Butter comes in sticks. Does it? Luckily between Google and my son and his American wife, I translated it all and came up with a recipe. Rich is a fair description. About a pound of flour (which one! French is different to UK and to US flour). I settled on Allisons bread flour, it served us well as newly weds, when we made our own bread for a good number of years. The bags say nothing of bleach and gluten levels. The US flour names equated to the UK 'plain' flour, again after some searching. Only one recipe suggested bread flour, which somehow felt right to me. In my bread making days (OK, our), we used to use live yeast and vitamin C tablets, which reduced the prep time requiring knocking back only once, rather than twice. All the recipes nominated dried yeast and all require knocking back twice. Oh. guilty of the same annoyance? Let it rise, then 'knock it back', i.e. pummel it back to its smaller size. Yorkshire expression perhaps. My grandma used to make bread for a fairly large family. She used a stone... 14lbs of flour at a time. She always recommended a warm kitchen in which to do it. Her oven bottom cake still makes my mouth water. The brioche recipes seem to want to bake in the arctic. Let it rise. Knock it back. Put it in the fridge, for four to six hours, or overnight! One or two offered half a reason for this change which made some sense, so I followed the advice. The result was that the loaf went in the oven around nine p.m., when I'd started baking (went out to buy flour) at 9:30 a.m. It took simply ages to rise once out of the fridge. Even more odd was the gloop that came out of the mixer. My advice would be to not attempt this without a fairly sturdy electric mixer. Ours is a Kenwood Chef approaching forty years old. Well up to scratch, yet the motor was decidedly warm when I scraped the mix out. I've never seen a mix like it! Shiny surface, beautiful yellow/white colour and sticky as hell. They all ask for a slapping sound with the mix stuck to the dough hook, although I don't think I heard that, so I simply stuck to 15 minutes mixing! I'll post the recipe later, but after breakfast this morning (let them have bread indeed) I can say it was worth it. . Even texture, light and very tasty!