Brioche!!

I've spent a couple days already reading, doing research by going to bakeries and testing out recipes. I  literally buried my nose in a lot of my pastry books when I'm at home or go to Barnes & Nobles to read some more. 

Bread is something I haven't made for quite a while so I needed to brush up on my skills and find my rhythm again. I make bread by hand. Kneading dough is so therapeutic and zen. When I started developing my interest in baking I started with a fascination with bread. At my family's house we had this book with a collection of european recipes and I just started following the recipes but I never really understood the science behind it. 

Then I went to culinary school(s), and to make the story short, I learned how to bake breads. However, with bread it's a totally different creature than cakes. The process is quite complex. You deal with a live ingredient which is Yeast. Yeast makes the bread what it is. Make friends with the yeast and you'll be making amazing breads.

Yeast comes in different forms - cake/compressed fresh, active dry or rapid-rise/instant-rise. Each can be substituted with the other so you just need to learn how to do that. You have to do some simple math to do conversions.

Active Dry Yeast and Instant Yeast weigh the same:  

1 tsp is .10 ounce or 3 grams

Fresh yeast weighs 3X than Active Dry and Instant yeasts. So lets say the recipe calls for fresh yeast weighing X amount in grams or ounces. 

Just divide by 3 the fresh yeast quantity and you'll get the amount in gram/s or ounce/s needed for the recipe in dry yeast form.

Anyway. 

After a second try, my Brioche came out right.. pillowy soft, spongy inside and light. And you can just smell the aroma of bread baking in the oven as well as when it's just pulled out of the oven. 

So learn the art of baking bread! It is quite a Zen experience. Plus you will be amazed how delightful it is to be tasting bread fresh out of your own oven.