Nutella Brioche

Flour does two different jobs here, which is why it's split. The 50g in the starter is just food and scaffolding for the yeast — nothing fancy needed, any plain flour does it. The 270g in the main dough needs to build enough gluten to hold a wet, buttery, egg-rich mix together without turning tough; plain flour works because this isn't meant to be chewy bread, it's meant to be soft and a little cakey. Strong bread flour here would fight you — more structure than this dough wants, closer to a bagel than a brioche.

Yeast, fresh or dried, is doing the one job that patience can't replace: it eats sugar and produces the gas that makes "rise at room temperature" mean something. If you only have dried, 7g for 20g fresh is the swap, and it goes into the starter exactly the same way — crumbled in, not proofed separately in warm water first, because the starter itself is the proofing stage.

The egg yolks and butter are what make this brioche and not a sweet bread roll — fat coats the gluten strands and keeps them from linking up too tightly, which is why the crumb stays soft and short rather than stringy. Butter must be properly softened, not melted: melted butter runs off instead of blending into the dough, and cold butter won't incorporate at all, leaving streaks that bake into dense patches. If you're out of butter, a neutral oil with no smell of its own will enrich the dough but won't give you the same short crumb — butter's water content and the way it solidifies again is part of the texture here, not just the fat.

Milk, split between the starter and the dough, is your liquid and a little food for the yeast via its natural sugars — any milk works, dairy or plant, as long as it's not so thin it can't bring the dough together.

Nutella is the one ingredient with no real substitute if you want this exact result — it's not just chocolate, it's chocolate plus hazelnut paste plus enough sugar and fat to stay spreadable and not seize when it hits oven heat. A dark chocolate ganache would behave completely differently in the oven — thinner, more likely to bleed through the cuts rather than sit as ribbons.

The beaten egg brushed on before baking is purely cosmetic chemistry — protein browning faster than the dough underneath, giving you that gloss and deep gold. Skip it and the loaf will still bake, just paler and duller, which matters more than people think: colour is your only honest doneness cue here, since a kitchen oven's actual temperature can drift 10-15 degrees from the dial without you knowing, 170°C fan is a starting instruction, not a guarantee.

On rise times: three separate rests — 20, 20, 40 minutes — aren't padding, they're three different structural jobs. The first wakes the yeast, the second relaxes the gluten you've just built by kneading so the dough rolls out without springing back, the third is the real proof, where the shaped, twisted loaf actually gains volume before the oven sets it. Rush any of them in a warm British kitchen in winter and the dough simply hasn't had time to do its chemistry — a draughty flat with the heating on and off is actually a worse environment than a cold larder, because temperature swings confuse the yeast more than a steady cool spot does.