Need Help with Brioche

[SHA]

I use Cook's Illustrated almost no knead recipe for brioche loaves and I get good results. I wanted to make brioche a tete but when I use the same recipe, the bread doesn't look nice. Any advice appreciated. For one tete, I use 4.5 oz bread flour, 2.2 oz butter, 1 tbsp. sugar, 1/8 cup milk, 3/8 tsp salt, 1/2 tsp instant yeast, baked at 350F for about 28-30 min.

 

[retired baker]

its undeveloped, brioche takes a lot of kneading and folding to develop the gluten.
It should be silky like satin, not cakey bread like.

 

[SHA]

The CI recipe calls for 4 periods of kneading every 1/2 hour (folding/kneading 8 times each 1/2 hour) - do the ingredient proportions look right ?

 

[retired baker]

thats a decent technique, CO2 builds in the dough and strengthens the gluten with each fold.
Bread flour is a good choice, I prefer hi gluten flour.
The recipe I got from Paris 60 yrs ago is different, its richer....and bigger.

You can convert everything to ounces and divide it down, its difficult if the recipe is too small, you get recipe drift.
20 eggs and 1 qt cold milk.
4 oz fresh cake yeast (or 2 oz dry).
5 lb high gluten flour
6 oz sugar
2 oz salt
2 lbs uns butter.
Mix until it develops and cover with wet cloth overnite, the next day it will work like modelling clay, not sticky.

I don't have a video of mixing a smaller dough, just baking it. Notice the darker color.
this batch was 8 oz butter, so thats 25% of the above recipe, easy to divide everything down by 4.
In paris they're amost black, thats normal.

 

[Bakingtime3]

I am not clear on what exactly you are trying to do. Are you trying to cut down the full recipe so that you only make enough for ONE of those little tart pans? As mentioned above, some recipes can't just be successfully scaled up/down.

I would look around online for proven brioche recipes from pro chefs. Compare the ratio of the main ingredients to get a sense of what tends to work for them. "No knead" recipes are intended as a short-cut to make yeast recipes faster. Usually that results in a trade-off in what you get in the final result.