Where there’s no law, there’s no bread. - Ben Franklin

This is not a “sourdough bread”, or as they call it outside of the US, bread. This is bread. Specifically it is brioche, or rather, it is supposed to be brioche. In a stand mixer with a dough hook I mixed the flour, sugar, salt, yeast, six eggs, and milk. I mixed for five minutes, then scraped the bowl and dough hook and added the butter ~ 100g at a time and mixing more, pausing to scrape the dough hook and bowl. Once all the butter was added I mixed for another 10 minutes. At this point I should have mixed until the dough passed the window pane test, but I didn’t. I mixed for 10 minutes and moved on.

I transferred the dough to a buttered bowl and covered with saran wrap and placed the bowl in another bowl with my heating mat and let sit for two hours for the first prove. After two hours the dough had doubled so I punched it down and set it on a buttered work surface and shaped the dough into a 16 x 4-inch rectangle, them rolled it like a Swiss roll and sliced it in half at the middle. I then transferred each half to a buttered baking tins and covered with buttered plastic wrap and set in the fridge to rise overnight.

The next day I removed the dough from the fridge and let it come to room temperature for two few hours, then heated the oven to 350° and baked for about 30 minutes.

Because I didn’t allow for proper gluten formation the bread is crumbly and dense, but it’s buttery and delicious, so that’s not a huge problem.

Dough
350 g all-purpose flour (Central Mills organic)
350 g bread flour (King Arthur)
6 eggs (+1 for the egg wash if you want, I didn’t)
100 g granulated sugar
100 ml (103 g) milk
10 g active dry yeast
15 g kosher salt
600 g unsalted butter

What I did right:
I’ve tried to make this bread once before, by hand, and that yielded a bread even shorter than this, having a stand mixer helped immensely.
What I did wrong:
I didn’t run the mixer long enough to allow for proper gluten formation, next time I’ll use the window pane test as the metric for readiness, not time.
What I learned:
Proper gluten formation is crucial to making a soft, airy brioche, without it, the brioche tastes dense and heavy and falls apart.