Baking Bouchon - Recipe 96: Savarins

CA, Sconnie and I are flying to Korea today.  Holy smokes.  As I'm writing this post, it's still a few days away but I'm already getting nervous.  Mostly about putting my sweet puppy in a crate for 20 hours.  I'm worried he'll be scared or completely freak out and attempt to claw his way out.  I want to cry thinking about it.  Instead I will think of baking, it's much happier.

I have never heard of or seen Savarins before.  They are brioche that are soaked in syrup - often times liquor syrup, but in this case, fruit flavored syrup.

The fruit was supposed to be passion fruit, but I couldn't find any fresh passion fruits, frozen passion fruits or passion fruit puree.  I settled on frozen tropical fruits.  I wish this was liquor syrup instead of fruit syrup.  Liquor makes things taste better.

The brioche rolls are made with flour eggs, yeast, butter and a lot of eggs.  It is mixed up and left to rise in a muffin tin.  The recipe suggests using a savarin mold which is something I was not prepared to buy.  Had I made these in the traditional savarin shape, they would have looked like little doughnuts.  Too bad.

The next step is to make the fruit syrup.  I blended up the frozen fruit and cooked it with water, sugar and vanilla beans and then strained it to create a tropical fruit flavored simple syrup.

The final step was to soak the brioche in the syrup.  The book advises that the syrup must be just the right temperature.  If it's too cold, the flavor won't absorb into the bread, but if it's too hot the bread will disintegrate.

My syrup was the exact right temperature when I put my brioche in it to soak but it didn't soak in AT ALL.  I submerged them in the syrup for several minutes even though the recipe didn't indicate that was necessary but it still didn't soak up much syrup at all.  I even tried poking holes in them to get the syrup to seep inside and got zero results.

The savarins are served with whipped cream and diced fruit - in my case mangos.  Unfortunately the savarins were dry on the inside with absolutely no fruit flavor.  I would have been just as happy (which was not very) if I'd just had whipped cream and mangos.

Enjoy!
Julie