I’m mixing my dough just now! , and I’m ready for Saturday baking along with friends ✌️ Are you ready guys? !!!

Here it is so you can look it over: https://pantry.bakinggreatbread.com/recipes/classic-brioche-bread (Remember there's a yeast and sourdough version) Brioche isn't a grab-and-go bread. The dough needs a long cold rest in the fridge, at least 8 hours, before you ever shape it. That rest firms the butter back up so the dough's easy to handle, and it deepens the flavor while you sleep. So look at your weekend and pick your path. Path one: start Friday night. Mix your dough, let it do its first rise, then tuck it in the fridge overnight. Saturday morning you pull it out, shape it, let it proof, and bake. This is the one I'd pick. You wake up already halfway home and ready to bake with the group. Path two: start early Saturday. Just know that the minute you mix, that dough's going in the fridge for at least 8 hours before it's ready to shape. So an early Saturday mix means an evening bake. Nothing wrong with that, you just want to plan your day around it. And here's the one thing nobody warns you about. Somewhere while you're working the butter in, the dough's gonna look slick and sloppy and flat-out wrong. That's the broken phase. Don't quit on it. Keep going and it comes right back together. So tell me below. Which path are you running, Friday night or Saturday morning? And have you baked brioche before, or is this your first go? Let's get everybody set before Saturday. Henry⭐🔥

I had a couple of requests on how to shape my broiche loaf. I went to YouTube and the one that spoke to me the most was Bim’s. It was very impressive and not difficult at all to shape. My biggest issue was fighting the heatwave today at 94 F. Tomorrow, it maybe hotter and I decided to rather bake today. The only issue while I rolled it out the butter kept melting and I had to place this in the fridge. I should have had my cooler with ice-packs and worked one piece of dough at a time next to me. Here is the link to Bim’s video. https://youtube.com/shorts/2A22rbRvWCQ?is=GdugOgJXqHqPO1Xf Tip: Tonight place all your baking utensils, bowl, rolling pin and ice-packs in the freezer to combat this awful heat and humidity. You can also transfer everything in your cooler next to you tomorrow while baking to keep everything as cold as possible. Happy Baking!

This week's bake-along is brioche, and if there's one thing I want you to take away from the entire process, it's this: Don't rush the butter. Get gluten development first. Before you add a single piece of butter, you should be able to pull a windowpane. The dough should already be smooth, elastic, and showing signs of strength. Why? Because butter makes gluten development harder, not easier. Once that butter starts going in, it's much more difficult for the dough to build the structure it needs to support all that richness. If you start adding butter too early, you can end up with a soupy, greasy mess that seems like it will never come together. Trust the process. Build strength first. Then add softened butter a little at a time, letting each addition fully incorporate before adding the next. The second thing to watch is temperature. Brioche dough should stay cool. If the dough gets too warm, the butter begins to soften and smear into the dough instead of creating the rich, silky structure we're after. But if I had to choose the most important lesson this week? It's gluten development before butter. Get your windowpane first. Everything else gets easier after that. Perfection is not required. Progress is. Henry ⭐🔥

I tweaked a couple of recipes in The Recipe Pantry this morning. Nothing dramatic, just the kind of small adjustments you only catch after you've baked something three or four times and the dough starts telling you what it actually wants. A little less water here, a cleaner shaping note there, a timing window that matches what really happens in my kitchen instead of what looked tidy on paper the first time around. https://recipepantry.app/ That's how these recipes evolve. I bake them, you bake them, we compare notes, and I go back in and sharpen the language so the next person who pulls it up gets the better version. The Pantry isn't a museum. It's a working kitchen. So here's the ask: when you open a recipe, read it. All of it. The headnote, the ingredient notes, the little asides in the steps, the FAQ at the bottom. That's where the real teaching lives. The grams and times get you in the door. The notes are what make the bread yours. If you baked one of mine recently and something felt off, or you found a move that worked better, tell me. That's how the next revision gets written. Keep baking, Henry⭐🔥