Latest news with #brioche
Time Out
29-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
The Peninsula Hong Kong is reimagining Bizet's ‘Carmen' opera
To commemorate the 150th anniversary of the legendary Carmen from French composer George Bizet, one of the world's best-known operas, The Peninsula Hong Kong is presenting a brand-new adaptation of this 1875 opera – but the catch is that it's set in a Hong Kong bar in the 60s and 70s instead of 1800s Seville. The story of the famous femme fatale Carmen is set against a distinctly Hong Kong style and features a cast of superb vocalists, including tenor Chen Yong, mezzo-soprano Ashley Chui, soprano Etta Fung, and baritone Isaac Droscha. And where else should Les Amours de Carmen Wong be held but within The Peninsula Hong Kong's beautiful fine dining spaces? Two performances will be held in their top-floor restaurant Felix and one in the legendary French dining destination Gaddi's. To make the three evenings even more special, each performance will be accompanied by culinary offerings specially created for the occasion. On the Saturdays of May 31 and September 20, head to Felix for the opera performance and to enjoy chef de cuisine Aurélie Altemaire's French duck foie gras terrine with strawberries, basil, and brioche feuille; French Baerii caviar with ricotta spinach ravioli and a warm lemon mayonnaise; along with an appetiser and a choice of mains. Of course, the meal is fittingly wrapped up with Felix Opera, a dessert made with coffee cream, chocolate ganache, and cardamom ice cream. In between the two performances at Felix, the fine-dining restaurant Gaddi's will also host a night of Les Amours de Carmen Wong on Monday, July 21. This one-off event will be accompanied by a four-course menu by chef de cuisine Anne-Sophie Nicolas, which features mains such as wild sea bass with Beluga caviar, vegetable medley, and bouillabaisse sauce, or Miéral pigeon with green peas à la Française, Girolle mushrooms, pearl onions, and rocket. The extremely limited Les Amours de Carmen Wong opera and dinner experience is priced at $4,800 per person, and is available by reservation only.
The Guardian
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘For indulgence, brioche is king' – the sweet, buttery bread stealing sourdough's crown
'You shouldn't have to fight your sandwich,' says Sacha Yonan, his voice rising to compete with the noise of London's Soho on a Tuesday morning. Within half an hour, queues for the sandwiches at Crunch, the cafe he co-founded earlier this year, will be snaking out of its doors. Its secret? Fresh brioche, which comes toasted and filled with ingredients that give the place its name, including southern-fried chicken, baby pickles and lettuce. 'We love a sourdough,' says Joni Francisco, his Crunch co-founder. 'But if you're talking about sandwiches, then you need something with an easier mouthfeel.' Could brioche be the new sourdough? Insofar as anything can be, sourdough being to bread what black is to fashion. In 2023, the humble white sliced loaf was hailed as a better sandwich bread than sourdough, the sourfaux scandal continues to rumble and, while we're not baking sourdough at home with quite the same zeal as we were during lockdown, our lust for the real deal is still very much around. What's new is the popularity of brioche beyond burger buns, fuelled by bakers who have come to appreciate its versatility. 'People in the UK understand brioche to mean any sweet, buttery white bread,' says baker James Morton, author of The Big Book of Bread: Recipes and Stories From Around the Globe. 'But proper brioche has a long fermentation time, and a lot of good French butter whipped into the dough after it's kneaded. It shouldn't have lots of sugar; the sweetness should come from the butter and that long, slow fermentation, which gives it a more complex taste.' Today, you're as likely to find it in at lauded restaurants like London's Sabor and The Shed in Swansea – plus cult bakeries like Edinburgh's Krema and London's Le Spot, a brioche-centric spot serving pulled oxtail brioche buns and brioche octopus hotdogs – as you are at Gail's (where it's blueberry-flavoured) or your average burger bar. 'It's buttery and springy and when you toast it you get those seared edges and slight bitterness from the toasting, which offsets heavier flavours,' says chef Jonathan Woolway of The Shed, of brioche's appeal in more rarefied settings. He serves his with game liver parfait. Inevitably, supermarkets have seen rising sales, too, though their brioches have none of the fine butter or long fermentation time that Morton mentions. Emilie Wolfman, trends manager at Waitrose, describes brioche as this summer's 'go to bread', and the store sells own-brand burger and hotdog buns, and a brioche loaf. As with many foods, its origin story is steeped in mystery. The Oxford Companion to Food says the word has been in use since the 15th century and derives from the verb 'broyer' –to break up – which refers to the prolonged kneading process. It is an enriched bread, which means it contains fat (in this case butter and eggs) as well as bread's standard trinity of flour, yeast and water. These luxury additions, along with the involved kneading process, meant that for centuries, brioche was a way flaunting wealth. 'In the 17th and 18th centuries, these ingredients were expensive. Butter was more expensive than beef,' says Dr Neil Buttery, aptly named food historian and author of Knead to Know: A History of Baking. Brioche moved around the upper classes and royal courts of Europe, becoming 'butterier, richer and eggier over the years', he continues. It's what Marie Antoinette was supposedly referring to when she suggested the starving poor eat cake in place of bread: 'Qu'ils mangent de la brioche.' Except Antoinette never actually said that. 'The phrase derives from German folklore, long before the French Revolution,' Buttery says. Still, the Antoinette fable is a useful indication of brioche's status. As with many things connected to class, 'aspiration has since brought brioche down', he says – but unlike chandeliers or designer handbags, connotations of luxury still linger. 'You feel a bit richer when you eat a brioche,' says Benoit Blin, chef patissier at Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons in Oxfordshire and a judge on Bake Off: The Professionals, who serves his with poached lobster. In part this is because it's French, and 'we revere French food, and their attitudes toward it', says Morton. Blin, who is French, puts this down to it seeming more artisanal than your average bun. '[One] associates burger buns with mass produced, highly processed food,' he says, so brioche buns became a way for classier burger joints to distinguish themselves. 'It's relatable, homely and reminds you of being a child,' says Crunch's Yonan – almost irrespective of where you grew up. Thanks to colonialism, globalisation and the agricultural revolution, which spread wheat to every corner of the globe, iterations of white enriched breads exist the world over. 'Bakers are for the most part working with the same ingredients,' says Morton, whose Big Book of Bread boasts numerous variations. 'So many breads are only mildly different – though with fierce defensiveness over them!' There is challah of the Jewish diaspora, babka of eastern Europe, concha of Mexico, pão doce of Portugal and milk breads of Britain and Japan. All are popular with everyone, but particularly children, being white, soft and slightly sweet thanks to that 'enrichment' of milk or butter. Brioche might feel like one of the most French foods imaginable, but you don't have to be French for it to make you feel at home. Like the crumpets of 2019, which appeared adorned with everything from braised mutton to lobster, it also taps into newstalgia: the neologism for our growing need, in unstable times, to experience the familiar bound up with the fresh. 'Everyone knows they are supposed to be eating real, healthy, wholegrain sourdough,' says Jonny Lake, chef and co-owner of Trivet in Bermondsey, which serves a brioche bun with pickles and beef tongue. 'But sometimes what you are looking for is toasted white bread.' In short, post-pandemic, sourdough has become too ubiquitous to impress diners. 'Everyone was baking sourdough when we were coming up with Crunch in 2021. We wanted to offer something different,' says Francisco. After months of experimentation, they developed a brioche made with a sourdough culture, to create a more structured bread that could hold sauce, and which people notice. 'When people think of [us], they think of the bread first,' he says. Brioche is not the new sourdough – and that's a good thing, says Morton. Neither our environment nor our health can sustain eschewing regeneratively farmed wholegrain loaves in favour of refined white bread enriched with butter – not on a daily basis. But as a luxurious addition to our glorious gastronomic scene, it is as welcome as its warm, yielding dough is. 'You don't have to fight it,' Yonan says triumphantly. 'For indulgence, brioche is king.'
New York Times
07-05-2025
- General
- New York Times
What Moms Want on Mother's Day
I won't be with my mom on Mother's Day (this Sunday, May 11; of course you knew that). But I know exactly what I'd make her: this French toast casserole. Is this Lidey Heuck recipe essentially bread pudding by another name, an easier way to prepare French toast for a crowd, a two-handed deep dish of vanilla-scented, custardy generosity? Yes, yes and yes. Naturally, I'd tailor the dish to her tastes. I'd use brioche, namely the coconut brioche from the Vietnamese bakery down the street (Mom loves coconut). I'd skip the cinnamon in the casserole and topping and instead use a bit of ground ginger, definitely some cardamom (Mom loves cardamom). I should have mentioned, too, that the brioche would have been discounted because it was a day past its sell-by date; this recipe is a great use of any stale-ish bread you have lying around (Mom loves not wasting food). Serve your French toast casserole with flowers and a handwritten card for full points. And don't forget to clean up afterward.
WIRED
06-02-2025
- WIRED
Our Experts Tested 5 Bread Makers for the Perfect Loaf
Panasonic Breadmaker SD-R2550 Knowing that Panasonic brought out the first self-contained bread machine for home use in Japan in 1986, I had high hopes for this machine when making bread in it for the first time. Sadly, my first attempt was a complete flop. I loaded my ingredients and waited patiently for four hours for the basic-bread setting to produce the goods, only to find that it came out uncooked and in much the same form as I had loaded the ingredients. After a bit of troubleshooting, I realized I hadn't put the bread pan in correctly. There's a knack to it whereby you need to push down the bread pan, twist, and lock it into place before turning the machine on. My second attempt was much more successful, as it's easy when you know how. There are 20 preset modes here (the latest SKYR2550 UK version has 31), although I was happy with just four as my go-to, including the basic option, a French, brioche, and the sourdough setting. The set comes with useful accessories such as a specific spoon and cup to make a sourdough starter. With three loaf sizes, three crust color settings, and a fruit-and-nut dispenser, it is flexible. Unlike the shiny LCD display of the Breville (reviewed below), the control panel on this model is basic, and there's no viewing window to snoop in on your bread. But simplicity works well here. The machine is easy to navigate, looks stylish on the countertop, and produces great results. Dimensions: 14.3 x 16 x 9.9 inches Number of settings: 20 Useful extras: 3 crust colors, 3 size options, measuring cup, spoon, sourdough cup and spoon Automatic dispenser (for fruit and nuts?): Yes Bread size: 'medium,' 'large,' and 'extra large' up to 2 lbs Delay start timer: No Wattage: 550 watts Breville The Custom Loaf Bread Maker With its signature brushed stainless-steel finish, this Breville bread maker (known as Sage in the UK) looks professional. It comes with a smart LCD display that looks far more high-tech than any of the other bread maker displays we've seen in our roundup and is also easy to navigate. It comes with nine custom settings so you can create and store your favorites, plus 12 preset modes for baking bread such as whole wheat or gluten-free. It also has an automatic fruit-and-nut dispenser on top and a viewing window complete with light that allows you to easily monitor the bread as the collapsible paddle mixes and kneads and the bread rises. There is a lot of information in the 'quick-start' manual. I don't mean to sound ungrateful, but I found it gave me far more information than I needed for a quick start. I really enjoyed using this machine, although it did get quite noisy and shook a little while it was ramping up the paddle—measuring 61.6 decibels at one point. Unfortunately, it didn't come with a measuring spoon or cup in the box, so I had to use my own. I found the control panel simple to use and was able to flick between three crust colors and choose from four bread sizes from 1 lb to 2.7 lbs. My white bread, rye, and whole-wheat loaves all came out perfectly square and nicely crusty with light and fluffy centers. Dimensions: 13.3 x 16.4 x 9.6 inches Number of settings: 12 preset modes and 9 custom settings Useful extras: 4 loaf sizes, 3 crust colors Automatic dispenser (for fruit and nuts?): Yes Bread size: Four sizes up to 2.5 lbs Delay start timer: Yes Wattage: 830 watts
