Key Baguette and Brioche Ingredients

When shopping for butter, you can buy salted or unsalted. In many markets, you can also buy cultured butter (which has been lightly fermented). We use regular unsalted butter and save cultured butter (either unsalted or salted) for spreading on toast—or perhaps a warm piece of baguette. Butter can pick up off-flavors and turn rancid when kept in the refrigerator for longer than a month. If you don’t use a lot, store butter in the freezer for up to 4 months in a zipper-lock bag and thaw sticks as needed. To take the guesswork out of softening the butter for our brioche we melt it instead.

Our brioche recipe relies on eggs for richness, color, structure, and moisture. We use large eggs in all our recipes. There’s no difference between white and brown eggs. If your refrigerator has an egg tray on the door, don’t use it. Eggs should be stored on the shelf, where the temperature is below 40 degrees. (The average door temperature in our test kitchen refrigerators is closer to 45 degrees.) Eggs are also best stored in their protective cardboard carton; when removed they may absorb flavors from other foods. The egg carton also helps maintain humidity, which is ideally 70 to 80 percent, and thus slow down evaporation of the eggs’ contents.

For breads with longer proofing times, like our baguette, nearly all the sugars in the dough are consumed by the yeast prior to baking. Since sugars are responsible for browning and caramelization, this can leave the crust pale and dull-tasting. Adding diastatic malt powder, a naturally occurring enzyme that converts the starches in flour to sugar, guarantees a supply of sugar at baking time and thus a crust that browns quickly and deeply (it also boosts flavor and improves the texture of the loaf overall). You can find it in some specialty baking stores or order it online.