Golden Brioche Loaves... Attempts #1 and #2

As you can see by the title things have not been going well with this recipe. I became Little Miss Cocky and decided I should jump right into making a yeast bread. HA... yeasted bread laughs in my face.

The dough forms into a nice ball at the beginning. Then you have to add 3 sticks of butter, 2 tbsp at a time, and mix for another 10 min when the dough should be pulling away from the sides of the bowl.

Attempt #1

This dough is the opposite of pulling away... this dough has separation anxiety and is hanging on for dear life. I decided to wait the hour for proofing to see if maybe it would miraculously turn into normal bread dough.

One hour later:

Um... nope. So after throwing that away, washing all the dishes and steeling myself for round 2 I decided to try again. I read the recipe (had Jeremy read it with me just in case I missed something important) and decided to make 2 adjustments. The first being that I would wait a bit longer to mix the yeast into the water and milk in the first step. The second being I would use colder butter. Her recipe called for room temperature butter but still slightly firm.

The second time seemed to go better. The dough came together nice again before the butter addition. I started to add the butter and tried to coax it along with the spatula. I let it mix for 11 min after everything was incorporated and it just never got to the point of pulling away from the sides of the bowl but it was closer so I figured I should see what happens.

Attempt #2

You can see it is more firm than the first batch but still not right.

One hour later:

I am for sure getting somewhere here. There are some dough like qualities to this mixture but not enough. It's not doubling in size either.

After throwing out batch #2 Jeremy suggested I look up other brioche recipes and see if there was a misprint in the book (always so supportive and willing to blame someone else... thanks Babe). What I found was someone who used this exact recipe but with more instructions regarding the yeast. They say to mix the water and milk and make sure they are between 105 and 115 degrees. Pour the yeast in and let it sit for 5 minutes then mix to dissolve.  After that the recipe seemed to be the same but if I was doing something wrong with the yeast it was never going to work.

Attempt #3 will probably be next weekend as I have to let it sit overnight so it's a good Saturday project.

Yeast will not beat me...