If this has been addressed I'm sorry; this is my first time here. In the recipe(and in several other recipes)you say that you don't recommend doing this bread by hand!?! One recipe even says "If you're 'gulp' doing it by hand..." seeming to imply that bread making by hand is so 1800's.
This is a sad state of affairs in my mind-one of the major things I enjoy about bread making is the total hands on experience; you're working with a living breathing thing here-it deserves some respect. People made Brioche for hundreds of years before the invention of either stand mixers, or bread machines.
I guess I said all that to say this: Do you have any recipe for Brioche doable by hand, or any guidelines for those of us "old fashioned" enough to still enjoy the hands on approach?
Thank you...
Just trying to make the bread approachable by all, Philip. In my opinion, using a machine to knead bread isn't disrespectful; no more disrespectful than it is to cut your lawn with a lawnmower rather than letting goats graze on it. I wasn't dissing the 1800s; just trying to give the greatest number of readers the best chance at success. You can certainly knead bread by hand, in which case you're following a very old and honored tradition indeed; or you can modernize your methodology and still get very good bread. So - keep the dough in the bowl, rather than turning it out onto a work surface. Knead it by hand as best you can; it'll be terrifically sticky. Try wetting your hands with water, rather than adding more flour, which will affect the texture, making it drier. When it starts to get less sticky, and becomes noticeably eleastic, you can probably stop and refrigerate it, then go from there. Good luck - PJH
December 13, 2009 at 5:01pm