Living in New York, I am constantly homesick for good bread. In my neighbourhood bodegas the bread is suffocated in plastic, and the sweet stuff comes from Entenmann's and would survive a nuclear winter. A Dominican bakery a couple of blocks from us does bake fresh pastries every day, but the bakers there are rather heavy-handed with artificial flavours and food colourings. "Artisanal" bread is sold in most gourmet markets, which almost invariably means sourdough, and that is not the flavour I look for in white bread. Four or five dollars for a baguette that is stale in a day does not thrill me either. Besides, the entire concept of gourmet bread is just plain silly. Good bread should be available everywhere.
We do it in Finland too, of course, drowning a splendid bread tradition in supermarket plastic bags on far too flimsy grounds. But I grew up in a house that smelled of pulla, the Finnish sweet yeast bun, on häälimppu loaves still warm from the Elanto co-operative bakery, and there are times when I miss proper bread painfully. Sour rye crispbread, hapankorppu, is in every supermarket here, but a good mixed-grain loaf and often even ordinary white bread are hard to come by.
The white bread that best suits a Finnish palate comes from Portuguese bakeries, and Portuguese bread can't be beat. The nearest ones I know of, however, are a subway and a train ride away in Mineola on Long Island and in Newark, New Jersey, which is a bit like taking the train from Helsinki to Hyvinkää, fifty kilometres up the line, for one's daily bread. The lovely Greek bakeries of Astoria satisfy all my cravings and are much closer, but even they lie at the far end of the jam-packed, snail-paced M60 bus.
I learned to bake yeast bread before I started school, and yeast dough takes time. Now there was a long President's Day weekend, and a frost hard enough to make me want to keep the hectare-sized American oven on. (For about six months of the year the heat and humidity make the oven a painful thought here.) So I finally decided to do something about my cravings. Inspired by the brioche pictures at La Tartine Gourmande, I started mixing recipes for French brioche and kouglof. But since I picked up the tricks of pulla dough when I was very small, I inevitably slid off the pedantically exact French recipes and onto more familiar tracks. I was aiming for the brioches I used to buy at the pastry counter of Stockmann, the Helsinki department store.
In my minuscule Manhattan kitchen the dough rises in the sink. I fill it with hot tap water and set the bowl afloat in it, and in half an hour to an hour the dough has doubled. I rolled mine into a rectangle on a floured plastic cutting board, scattered it with the rum raisins and the almond slivers and rolled it up like cinnamon buns. I cut the roll into six and put five pieces into a buttered muffin tin. The sixth I cut into five and rolled into tiny balls to sit on top of the big pieces in imitation of Parisian brioches.
I ate mine warm with Swedish raspberry and blueberry preserve, the kind known as queen's jam, from the IKEA in New Jersey.
Recipe card
Brioche
- 5 mini brioches
- Rising 30-60 min in a warm water bath, or overnight in the fridge
- Second rising 30 min
- Oven 175 °C / 350 °F
- Baking about 20 min
You will need
| 500 g | plain (all-purpose) flour |
| 25 g | fresh baker's yeast, or one sachet of active dry yeast |
| 2 | eggs |
| 100 g | butter, at room temperature, cut into little pieces |
| 1 tsp | salt |
| 65-85 g | sugar |
| 75 ml | warm (but not too warm) milk |
Filling and glaze
| 100 ml | raisins |
| 2 tbsp | dark rum |
| a handful of almond slivers | |
| 1 | beaten egg for basting |
Method
- Make a yeast dough just as you would for pulla. Mix the flour and the active dry yeast. Add the warm milk, salt, sugar and one of the eggs, and mix vigorously. Add the other egg and knead for 5-10 minutes, then add the butter. (If you are using fresh baker's yeast, which I prefer whenever I can get it, crumble the yeast into tepid milk, then add the salt, sugar and flour.)
- Add a bit of flour or milk if the dough feels too dry or very runny. Knead until the dough comes away from the bowl. Cover with a tea towel.
- Leave to rise until doubled in size, twice if you want to improve the flavour of the brioches. My favourite method is to fill the kitchen sink with hot tap water and put the bowl in the water (it will float): the dough will rise in 30-60 minutes. If you let the dough rise overnight in the fridge, take it out at least 1.5 hours beforehand, so that it reaches room temperature before you shape it.
- Let the raisins soak in the rum in the meantime.
- When the dough has doubled, punch it down and sprinkle it with a little extra flour to get a ball of dough that is not sticky. Roll it out into a rectangle. In my minuscule kitchen I do this on a clean, lightly floured plastic cutting board of 40 x 30 cm.
- Sprinkle the almond slivers and the raisins (and possibly a bit of extra butter) on top of the dough, then roll it up like a Swiss roll or cinnamon buns, starting from the longer side. Cut into six pieces.
- Butter a muffin tin (I used one that has six 9 cm / 3.5 in cups) and put five pieces into the cups. If you wish to make Parisian-shaped brioches with small heads, cut the sixth piece into fifths, shape them into balls and fuse them on top of the bigger pieces.
- Baste with beaten egg and let rise for 30 minutes.
- Bake at 175 °C / 350 °F for about 20 minutes or until golden.
- Serve warm, on their own or with good jam.
The blog has just switched to English, but I have written this one in Finnish as well. Blogging is my main way of keeping up something other than an Instant Messenger style in my mother tongue, so I am not giving up posting in Finnish altogether just yet.
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