February 4, 2024
The bowl of my 2006 KitchenAid mixer is filled with flour, milk, sugar, levain. I turn the mix speed to “stir,” the lowest it can go, and it spurts to life. But brioche dough needs more than “stir” to past the windowpane test.
When the mix speed passes 2, the machine begins jumping around the counter, making its way perilously close to the edge. The dough climbs the dough hook and tips over the point where it’s attached, necessitating frequent pauses to scrape it back into the bowl. But that’s fine, because the pauses double as a convenient opportunity to shove the machine back toward the wall, so it can begin yet another slow trek toward the counter’s edge.
The bar connecting the head of the KitchenAid to the base continually inches out of its hole, requiring serious banging to pop back into place. The motor overheats from the effort, forcing more pauses. Fifteen minutes in and I’m not even past the windowpane test; I stretch the dough to check and it just shreds. More mixing still, and we haven’t even begun the meditative butter addition. This process take my skittish old workhorse takes about as long as an episode of Project Runway, which isn’t the worst form of habit bundling. All in all the process of mixing brioche dough takes me closer to an hour, me standing watch all the while.
When the last pat of butter finally disappears into the dough, it’s time to bulk ferment (that is, first stage of rising) and later, proof (second stage), where I tuck the dough into inconspicuous little balls that will, over the course of hours, puff up into the most adorably jiggly proto-brioche balloons.
But first I have to get the dough out of the bowl. I wrap my hands around the mixing bowl to unwind it from the mixer base and give a tug. Nothing. I pull harder. Nothing still. I try anchoring the machine against another appliance, put my whole body into it, sweat from the exertion. Nothing gives.
Finally I ask for help, the last refuge of the stubborn woman. My husband’s attempts to wrest it free are as unproductive as mine. Normally I’d be secretly tickled in a misguided feminist sort of way that it really was as stuck as it seemed to me, but this is too important to be smug. Could this be the end of the ride for my beloved old machine?
In situations like this I tend to weep and write a poem.
My husband, who is of a different temperament, calmly walks downstairs, reappearing moments later with a selection of tools.
First, a strap of some kind encircles the bowl. He determinedly twists some kind of counter-lever, which, in a technique whose physics I do not fully understand, finally frees the bowl. Then it’s screwdrivers, and youtube instructional videos, and a dime placed on the bottom of the bowl so he can test the machine’s alignment. He orders two new parts on Amazon. Over the course of a week he tunes and tightens and adjusts and replaces. Admittedly, this seems like a better response than poetry. (I regret, dear reader, that I do not have a photo of my beloved husband wrestling the machine and attending to its maintenance with tender loving care.)
The machine is looking better now, with its shiny newly installed base, and a shiny new mixing attachment to replace the one whose ends have just snapped apart from the exertion. I can’t vouch for how many minutes it will take to make brioche dough next time, but with all the tuning, it does seem at significantly lower risk of falling off the counter.
Clearly, further testing is needed.
(to be continued)
