Best Super Easy Brioche Dough Recipe

This homemade brioche bread recipe is such an easy recipe and makes one of my favorite breads. Brioche dough is the base for so many of my favorite bakery sweets: cinnamon rolls, flaky Danishes and bread pudding. It also makes the most pillow soft bread that is just perfect for French toast. This is personally my favorite thing to bake. It is so easy, yet the results are so decadent. 

What is Brioche Bread?

Bread, in its most basic form is made from four ingredients: flour, yeast, salt, and water. With those humble ingredients, we can bake the most delicious breads. Think sourdough, pizza dough, baguettes, and bagels! Enriched dough, however, adds “bonus” ingredients like butter, eggs, milk, and sometimes sugar or honey to create richer, softer doughs to be made into things like cinnamon rolls, French toast, or soft dinner rolls for a special occasion. Brioche is one such enriched dough using additional ingredients including eggs, butter, milk and sugar. The result is a bread that is soft and billowy, with a silky crumb. Not only is it the perfect bread dough for things like rolls and French toast, but it makes the most delicious PB and J sandwiches as well as grilled cheese.

The Science of Bread

Fermentation

When we add yeast to flour and water, a magical thing happens. Our bowl of dough becomes a living thing! The yeast wakes up and begins to digest the carbohydrates in the flour. As byproducts. the yeast forms carbon dioxide and alcohols. The carbon dioxide is the gas that forms bubbles and allows the dough to rise. The alcohols, on the other hand, give our bread dough that complex, sometimes sweet flavor we’re looking for. In brioche, we can accomplish fermentation two ways: cold and slow, by using less yeast or same day (immediate satisfaction) with more yeast. For the purpose of this post, we’re going to plan on baking our brioche the same day we make the dough. After all, sometimes you just need bread today!

Gluten Development

All flours that come from wheat–whole wheat flour, bread flour, and all-purpose flour–contain what we call gluten potential. In other words, when we add water to flour, two proteins, namely gliadin and glutenin, chemically react to form elastic strands called gluten. As we manipulate the mixture of flour and water by mixing, kneading, stretching and folding, or even just allowing it to sit for long periods of time, the gluten network becomes even more developed. That’s why bakers use the terminology “developing dough,” to describe their efforts to build a good network of gluten.

Why do we need a good network of gluten? In bread, or specifically brioche for the purpose of this post, we need a good network of gluten strands to trap the gas bubbles that have formed in the fermentation stage and allow a beautiful rise in the bread. It would be a shame to create all that carbon dioxide in fermentation and then just let it escape, leaving us with a very flat dough. In addition to allowing our dough to rise adequately, gluten also gives breads like pizza crust, bagels, and sourdough bread that lovely chew we enjoy. Brioche, on the other hand, needs to be less chewy and more “billowy.” The addition of fat in the form of butter in traditional brioche will mellow the chewiness and give us the perfect texture of bread for all the ways we want to use it, whether it’s French toast, dinner rolls or cinnamon rolls.

How do you know the gluten is fully developed? By doing the window-pane test. Simply take a small piece of the dough and begin to stretch it gently. If it’s developed enough, you should be able to stretch the dough until it becomes translucent, and you can see light through it. If it just tears apart, it simply needs to continue mixing until the dough achieves more elasticity.

​You will really be able to see gluten structure at work in the recipe. 

​Ingredients

Butter

Butter in this enriched dough recipe is one of the reasons brioche is such a special bread. However, it can make it a trickier bread. Butter can slow down yeast, causing it to struggle to rise.  That is why I have added a larger amount of instant yeast to this recipe to help overcome the retardation of the rise and allow a faster path to our end product.  In addition, butter can slow down gluten development, requiring longer mixing times to achieve the gluten structure we need. These effects of butter are both easy to overcome and its contributions to the bread are so worth it!

In many recipes I have seen for brioche, the mixing is divided into two stages: before the addition of butter and after. As you’ll see, I start with everything in the mixer, and continue from there. I prefer to use room temperature butter separated into small pieces. In small pieces, the butter is able to mix together with the rest of the ingredients faster. This allows the kneading process to be more about creating gluten structure and less about incorporating the ingredients. Finally, I like salted butter in most of my bread recipes, and this brioche is no exception.

Milk

Whole milk is my choice for this recipe. This is a special bread, and we don’t want to skimp on fat! Some recipes for same-day brioche will have you warm the milk, but you don’t have to. It will probably speed up the rise time, especially if your kitchen is cold, but it isn’t necessary.

Eggs

Eggs will give this dough its beautiful, yellow-tinged coloring. The eggs also act as an emulsifier, helping liquids to combine with fats. This helps to create the smooth, pillow like dough we’re trying to create. It also helps strengthen gluten structure giving our bread great shape and volume. This recipe also includes an egg wash before it gets put in the oven, giving our bread a gorgeous golden-brown color. 

Sugar

Sugar not only adds sweetness to this dough, but it also adds softness to the crumb of the finished brioche.

Instant Yeast

This recipe has 1 and 1/2 Tablespoons of yeast. That is quite a lot of yeast compared to most of the breads we bake. First, this will help overcome the large amount of fats and sugar in this dough. Second, when we want to make dough and bake it the same day, we have to allow for a lot of fermentation in a short period of time. Increasing the amount of yeast allows for this.

A cold and slow approach to fermentation, on the other hand, requires less yeast, but more time in the refrigerator rising. Both approaches work, but only the first one will get you bread the same day!

Bread Flour

I use bread flour for this recipe or King Arthur all-purpose flour. Both have an adequate amount of protein to allow for good gluten development.

Kneading the Dough

For this recipe I use my Kitchen Aid stand mixer with a dough hook attachment. Unless you have some very strong arms, I suggest you do the same.  You start by simply adding all your ingredients into the bowl of a stand mixer. Then you let the dough knead on medium speed for 15-20 minutes. At first, when your ingredients begin to incorporate, it will look very wet and shaggy. But as the dough continues to mix, it will magically become smoother, and will eventually pull away from the sides of the bowl. You can then transfer your dough to a large bowl that has been sprayed with baking spray or greased with oil, cover with plastic wrap and begin your first rise. 

​First Rise

After properly mixing your dough, let it sit for its first rise, (also called bulk fermentation). The first rise should take about an hour to an hour and a half. The warmer your kitchen is, the faster your dough will rise. After your dough has doubled in size you are ready to shape it. For those of us who make sourdough, this seems like a pretty rapid rise. This impressive dough rise is thanks to our hardy amount of instant yeast.

Shaping Your Dough

This is where you can really get creative with your dough. This recipe can make you…

• Two regular brioche loaves, about 18 oz per loaf.
• Cinnamon rolls
• Two Babka loaves
• Danishes; laminated or unlaminated
• The options are endless!

Whatever you choose to do with your dough you will still follow the same routine. Shape it to your desired shape, whether you are rolling it out for rolls or babka or shaping for a loaf. Then let it have a proper second rise (also called the final proofing).

Second Rise

After the loaves (or whatever baked product you choose) have been shaped, pre heat your oven. After about 30 minutes your dough should look bigger and puffy–not quite doubling in size, but close. At this point, you can egg-wash your loaves with a pastry brush.

Baking

The key to baking brioche is having an internal thermometer. I recommend the Thermapen. It’s an instant-read thermometer, can be washed easily and lasts forever. When this brioche recipe is perfectly baked it will reach an internal temperature of 186 degrees F.  This will give you a beautiful, fluffy moist brioche bread. Whether you’re baking cinnamon rolls or brioche loaves, your bake times will be different. However, the internal temperature of 186 degrees F will stay the same.

If you do not have an internal thermometer then bake the loaves for 25-30 minutes. The loaf will be golden brown and will feel light and hollow when cooked through. When the loaf is uncooked inside it still feels heavy when you lift your pan.