Here is how I spent the portion of my Saturday that was not spent at the New York Public Library, cursing at the overly-specific search engine in their catalogue. (Incidentally, the online catalogue of the New York Public Library is called CATNYP. Whoever is responsible for this must be slapped, and roughly.)
Item on the left is plain white enriched bread dough: flour, milk, yeast, salt, sugar, butter. (Normally I take a firm stand against sugar in bread dough, but I will be testing variations of this recipe about 50 times between now and June, and I want to follow the recipe as written at least once.) This dough had fermented for about 20 minutes before I made the dough on the right, the same as above with two eggs added to the dough. The dough on the left is very, very stiff and holds its shape well. The dough on the right is softer, satiny, and has that nice baby’s bottom spring that we associate with well-kneaded white bread dough.
Dough in the picture underneath is brioche, made with the same quantity of flour (825 grams) with much less sugar and salt, but much greater quantities of butter and eggs, namely a pound of butter and a dozen eggs.
All of these doughs have been rising slowly, slowly, slowly in the fridge all weekend. The brioche is out of the oven. The white-with eggs is in the oven now. The white-without will go in as soon as it finishes proofing. Stay tuned, dear friends.
