How to make soft and fluffy brioche ? - Régilait (2024)

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How to make soft and fluffy brioche ? - Régilait? ›

For softer brioche, add three dessertspoons of powdered milk to your mixture. The secret behind soft and fluffy brioche is powdered milk! It makes brioche soft and fluffy, giving it a chewy, tasty texture and a golden colour. It also ensures it keeps for longer.

Brioche is a classic French bread distinguished by the addition of butter and eggs, which makes it an “enriched” dough. The high fat content results in a bread with an exceptionally tender crumb, pillowy softness, and rich flavor.

Brioche is a type of bread, but better than you could imagine! It's a soft, lightly sweet, rich bread that works in sweet and savoury dishes alike. The reason brioche is so light and tastes so rich is because it's made with an enriched dough,which gives it that soft texture and amazing taste.

Your Kitchen Is Too Hot

If you're new to making bread, then you might be amazed to discover that the temperature in your kitchen plays a significant part in the bread's texture. If it's too hot within your home, your bread could be too dense upon the proofing.

Preheat your oven to 300º F (150º C), wrap your bread in foil, and set it in the oven for 5-15 minutes. If the crust is soft, unwrap the foil and give it an extra 5 minutes. Or, pour a shallow layer of water into a steamer and bring it to a boil. Place your bread in a steamer basket and steam it for 5 minutes.

If the kneading is not done correctly and the dough is not kneaded enough or is kneaded too much, this will affect the texture of the brioche. The dough should be left to rise in a warm place, away from any draughts.

Why should butter be added slowly to brioche dough? Adding the butter into your brioche dough is a fairly lengthy process, and the butter should only be added approx. one tablespoon at a time. This is so the dough maintains the stretchy gluten we've built up, and the butter is absorbed slowly.

The flour you used may have contained too much protein. Protein is one of the ingredients that help yeast bread brown. Use bread flour that is purchased at a grocery store or a national brand of all-purpose flour.

With cold butter only being used when making brioche where temperature control is critical. Softened butter is my go-to for most other bread dough types. Melted butter is something I have always avoided because it would need to be added at the beginning of mixing unlike the softened or cold butter.

How can I make my bread fluffier instead of dense? ›

Potato Flakes or Potato Water

Starch helps the dough by trapping the gas from the yeast in the dough and makes the bubbles stronger. This helps the bread to rise and be lighter and fluffier. If you are boiling potatoes, you can use the unsalted water in place of the water in your bread recipe to help out the yeast.

Too much butter will result in a very soft, sticky dough that's difficult to shape, and bakes up greasy and dense.

The over-kneading dough is a common bread making mistake, which makes gluten too tight for bread to rise, resulting in chewy bread instead of fluffy. Kneading correctly is most important to strengthen the gluten and give your bread a perfect texture.

And much like pie dough, brioche is all about the butter, just expressed differently. Instead of being crisp and flaky, brioche is pillowy and soft, thanks to an almost three-fold increase in hydration (about 25% for pie dough versus 70% for brioche), mainly in the form of eggs and the addition of yeast.

The point of kneading dough is to help strengthen the gluten in it. Gluten is what gives your bread; it's structure and texture. Gluten that is not strong enough results from under kneaded dough, whereas gluten that is too tight results from over kneaded dough.

Overnight Proof: By letting the dough rise slowly in a cold environment, it not only develops more depth of flavor, but also gives you more flexibility with the timing of baking the loaf. Cold brioche dough is also much easier to work with!

However, due to the higher butter content in brioche, brioche contains more fat and more calories than other kinds of bread. Unfortunately, the fat content comes mainly from saturated fats, which should be limited to 5% to 6% of a person's daily caloric intake, according to the American Heart Association.

Because of its richer ingredients, brioche has a sweeter taste than most bread. It's less buttery than a croissant and less sugary than a cookie, but it has a distinctive pastry-like quality to it.