Petites Brioches a Tete with Prosciutto & Gruyere

I hesitate to count the trays of eggs and pats of butter I've imprudently consumed in the name of working on brioche. Some time last year, I became somewhat obsessed with making a decent brioche. In my books, that's one that manages to be tenderly feathery in texture yet bursting with buttery richness in taste. To create a tight-crumbed brioche that's cake-like in texture (which some may prefer) was not my goal - for that, if you ask me, I might as well make pound cake, which also happens to be a tiny fraction of the trouble. Naturally, many said trays of eggs and pats of butter were flagrantly dumped in recipes that promised one texture but turned out another. To minimise waste of time, I have since learnt - an education paid for in eggs and butter - to sort the feathery from the cakey by scrutinising the recipe instructions (no matter what the author may purport) before springing for my KitchenAid. After many intermittent spells of brioche recipe tinkering (poor "Why can't we just eat normal bread?" W), I have finally grasped the essentials (invaluably gleaned, amongst others, from Peter Reinhart's The Bread Baker's Apprentice, Julia Child and Simone Beck's Mastering the Art of French Cookery Volume II, and Nancy Silverton's advice in Baking with Julia) for creating some semblance of the texture I so desire, and have thus officially entered the second phase of my pathological brioche baking, the miasma of myths that shrouded my path to perfect brioche having been cleared...

Mention the word prosciutto, and I used to immediately think of the justly legendary prosciutto di Parma, the fabulous air-cured ham from Langhirano in Emilia- Romagna. Well, as of a couple of days ago, not anymore. Thanks to Chubby Hubby and his lovely wife, S, who generously gave us some of the prosciutto di San Daniele he had brought back from a recent trip to Venice, I now know why this mandoline-shaped ham from the province of Udine in Friuli is considered by many to at least rival, if not better, its more famous cousin. Less assertively salted than Parma ham, the San Daniele ham seems sweeter in contrast. As Fred Plotkin (the author of the indispensable Italy for the Gourmet Traveller guide) puts it in La Terra Fortunata - his ode to the glorious food and wine of the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region - prosciutto di San Daniele at its best is "a miraculous hybrid of flesh and silk". I had taken out some slices for a quick lunch of cold cuts, cheese and bread yesterday. We polished off everything laid out save a few scraps, which I was reluctant to toss out - the idea of buttered fresh egg noodles tossed with sage and ham was burning dimly at the back of my mind, I guess. As happens a lot when there are too many reminders of meals past, present and future - read: odds and ends - lurking in the fridge, I got sidetracked. Namely, by a big bowl of hibernating brioche dough leftover from some flamiche I made a few days ago (brioche dough, incidentally, makes a terrific tart shell). I am particularly fond of this batch, which is bursting with buttery flavour thanks to the unsalted beurre d'Echire used.

Inspired by the spicy salami and cheese flecked Casatiello bread I had read about in Carol Field's wonderful The Italian Baker, I decided to make some petites brioches a tete flavoured with prosciutto di San Daniele and gruyere. Depending on your frame of reference, Casatiello (being an egg and butter enriched dough) is like a piquantly flavoured Italian relative of brioche, or a savoury version of panettone (the rich Milanese bread consumed at Christmas) studded with cured meat and cheese in lieu of nuts and candied fruit. The resulting little rolls were pretty tasty - I can't wait to try making the Casatiello recipe proper.