| Like before most new things I see a lot of people going “woah! that’s not for me, never tried that before, I just know I’ll fail.” when it comes to cooking/baking. The thing is, you never know till you try and you’ll never learn if you never try. Yes, you will fail many times. Yes, you will end up with tons of inedible stuff at one point or another. Everyone ends up with failures. No one mastered the art of riding a bike without first falling a few times, or if they have it’s probably because they had training wheels.
And now as to conclude this, let me present a failure that still turned out to be a great brioche! There are few foods I love more than mantou bread or those buns filled with red beans. I still haven’t found a Chinese grandma to cook these things for me, so my choices are essentially buying frozen stuff at the far away store or trying my hand at making some. Like with everything that’s good and in the freezer/cupboard I almost prefer the feeling of knowing it’s there for “emergencies” to the feeling of eating it. And thus it was time to try my hand at mantou bread. I had two recipes (1 – 2) to help me. I promptly went on to ignore most of the indications and cut the amounts in very weird ways… and added some ingredients. The end result was more of a brioche than mantou bread but I like brioche too. Next time I’ll add some milk or cream to see if I can get some petits pains au lait.
The one thing I highly dislike about some recipes that use yeast is that fact that yeast comes in different forms and shapes in different countries. Like I know what the heck “activated some-more-weird-words yeast” is. I know of two yeasts, levure de boulanger and the yeast for bread machines that comes in that little packet seem in the background of the above photo. Conclusion: I believe I let the things rise too long. Conclusion: Steaming brioche. Why hadn’t I thought of that before? Should totally work for pains au lait too. PS: if you’re looking for a recipe, there are links at the top! I kind of followed them and then added some fleur d’oranger. Because I add fleur d’oranger to everything. |
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