Brioche: A Bread So Good, It’s To Die For
A bread that cost a queen her head and helped start a revolution!
When the queen was told her people were starving — that they had no bread — she answered: “If they have no bread, why don’t they eat cake?”
So the story goes. Late-1700s France was simmering toward revolution: the people were hungry, bread was scarce, and the young queen Marie Antoinette became the face of a monarchy hopelessly out of touch. Those few careless words came to stand for everything wrong with the crown — and helped light the fuse of the French Revolution.
There’s just one problem with the most famous quote in French history.
In the original French, it was never “cake” at all. It was “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche” — let them eat brioche. Not a frosted cake, but the rich, buttery, egg-enriched bread.
And it almost certainly never happened. The line was written by the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his Confessions, around 1766 — crediting only “a great princess” — when Marie Antoinette was about ten years old and still living in Austria. She wasn’t blamed for it until decades after the Revolution. An author put the words in a royal mouth to make a point about the rich, and history pinned them on the wrong queen.
So why brioche? Because it was — and still is — the crown of French baking. Made rich with butter and eggs when both were luxuries, brioche was the bread of pleasure and plenty: the loaf that stood for the good life. Whoever wanted a single word for careless indulgence reached for brioche, because nothing else said it quite so well.
That golden, buttery, luxurious crown of French bread is the one that inspired the name of our bakery.
Real Sourdough, or “Sourfaux”?
Real sourdough is one of the most honest foods there is — and one of the hardest to make. It rises on nothing but a living starter of wild yeast and friendly bacteria, kept alive and fed like a small pet. No packet yeast to force a quick rise, no additives to cut a corner: just flour, water, salt, and a great deal of patience.
And it cannot be rushed or left alone. The dough is fussy about temperature — a few degrees warmer or cooler changes everything — so the baker watches it closely. You can’t simply mix it and walk away, either: over the first hours you come back again and again to stretch and fold the dough by hand, building its strength gently, letting it rest and rise, then returning to stretch it once more. Only then comes the long, final rise. It is craft, not convenience — slow, hands-on work that can stretch across a day or two.
And that difficulty is exactly why it’s so often faked. All those hours, the skill, the constant attention — they cost money and can’t be rushed onto a factory line; real sourdough was never built for mass production. So many producers sell the premium name without doing the work. The result is what bakers call sourfaux — bread that borrows the name without the method: pushed up with commercial yeast or baking powder, given a tangy taste with added vinegar, yoghurt, or acids, then kept soft for weeks with preservatives, emulsifiers, a whole chemistry lab at work. Where real sourdough has three ingredients, a sourfaux label runs to a paragraph.
So how do you tell them apart?
Read the label. Real sourdough lists little more than flour, water and salt — and no added yeast. Commercial yeast, acids, preservatives, or a long list of chemical ‘bread improvers’ all mean sourfaux.
Taste it. Real sourdough has a gentle, complex tang that builds as you chew — a depth only slow fermentation can create. Sourfaux is usually either flat and bland, or sharply one-note sour from the vinegar or acids poured in to fake it.
Look and feel. A real loaf has an open, uneven crumb — those irregular holes — a proper chew, and a crisp, blistered crust. Sourfaux tends to be uniformly soft all the way through, with a soft crust, every loaf identical to the next. And real sourdough keeps honestly — no preservatives, so it stays good for about a week, and even once it firms up a quick toast brings it right back to life. A “sourdough” that stays soft for weeks has additives doing that work.
And here’s the part that matters most. That slow fermentation isn’t only about flavour — it’s where the health difference comes from too. Given hours to work, the wild yeast and bacteria break down some of the starches and gluten before the bread ever reaches you. The result: real sourdough has a lower glycemic index than ordinary white bread — it raises blood sugar more gently — and many people find it easier to digest. Sourfaux skips the fermentation, so it skips the benefits: it’s fast white bread wearing a fancier name. Still, sourdough is bread, not a health cure — and it isn’t gluten-free.
In Britain, campaigners are even pushing for a law to protect the word, and they’ve named it, fittingly, the Honest Crust Act. We didn’t invent that name. It’s just how we already bake.
Sourdough: The Original Bread
Long before packet yeast existed, all raised bread was sourdough. For most of human history, the only way to make dough rise was to let wild yeast — the kind floating in the air and living on the grain — ferment it slowly.
It’s widely credited to the ancient Egyptians, thousands of years ago, most likely by accident: a bowl of flour and water left out, caught wild yeast, bubbled up, and baked into something lighter than flatbread. The Romans were already keeping back a piece of yesterday’s dough to start today’s loaf. Commercial baker’s yeast only arrived in the 1800s — that’s when fast, uniform bread took over.
Sourdough’s most famous chapter came with the 1849 California Gold Rush: prospectors fed and guarded their starters so carefully — even cuddling the jar on cold nights to keep it alive — that the miners themselves were nicknamed “sourdoughs.” Not much has changed in our kitchen: just like those miners, we guard and cuddle our own starter and feed it its favourite flours — so there’s a smile on your face when you bite into our sourdough.
