Croissants: Part One

Top 10 "Most Difficult" Recipes: #9 Croissants
Total Batches: Three
Time: Two days to mix, ferment, retard, laminate, roll, proof and bake.
Butter: TWENTY THREE sticks of butter
Difficulty: My arms hurt so bad I can barely lift a croissant!

Okay, so croissants are no picnic, but I always knew that. Know what makes croissants harder? When the recipe from a cookbook you trust is flat out wrong and you blindly follow even though your gut is shouting: Turn back, matey! Thar be danger ahead!

Yes, my gut speaks pirate.

Anyway, I took on croissants this weekend and as per usual whenever I need a good baseline for a classic pastry recipe I pull out my CIA Baking book. It's basically my baking encyclopedia; dense, heavy and packed with recipes and excellent technical information. Unfortunately the croissant recipe in my edition is bad. The measurements are incorrect and the instructions treat your stand mixer with roughly the same tenderness that a teenager gives a borrowed sports car.

However I didn't know this last weekend and blindly followed the recipe thinking Ms. Humble would never know better than the exalted CIA. So I did and the results were disastrous. Both the milk and the flour weights in metric are wrong (granted they do give correct imperial weights, which I ignored preferring to use metric). I caught the typo for the flour right off the bat, as 1.13g of flour is obviously not going to yield 5lbs of pastry.

Yea, those weights are not right...

The milk error however was not caught before the first batch and Mr. Humble and I stared at our bowl of crumbs befuddled.

Mr. Humble: Maybe you should have used the dough hook instead of the paddle attachment on your mixer?

Me: Trust me, a dough hook isn't magically going to make this mess into a dough. This is powder. Something is wrong... did you weigh the dry ingredients correctly?

Mr. Humble. YES, I did! Maybe it turns into dough after you let it ferment.

Me: I'm not sure how that is physically possible but fine, I'll give it a shot.

So we let it ferment on the counter for two hours and then checked on it.

Nope. Nothing magical occurred and the 'dough' remained a pile of croissant sand.

Now it has been years since I last made croissants but I knew this wasn't right. So I just tossed out the recipe and threw the crumbs back into the mixing bowl and added an additional 3/4 cup of milk, the bare minimum to bring it together into a coarse dough. I toss that onto the counter to ferment and it two hours later and a quick kneading we had something that resembled a dough. That slab went into the refrigerator overnight and the next day I had the pleasure of laminating my 5lbs of intensely tough dough.

And that is WITH the 'extra' milk.

It wasn't pretty. Laminating that dough was just brutal. In fact it probably wasn't possible. The dough survived up until the final batch of rolling and folding before it started breaking down. In a dough that dry, there just isn't enough gluten development to give it the bare minimum of elasticity for lamination. I knew it was wrong but for some reason I tried to keep my faith in the recipe. So after wrestling with the dough for much of the morning I tossed it, the recipe and started over.

I came up with my own version of the CIA's recipe, adding more milk and a little brown sugar: I was rewarded with these:

Flaky, golden and delicious. Not bad for a recipe created by feel. Not perfect though. Those pesky little gaps between the spiral of dough! Grr! Something is definitely wrong there.

The interiors could also be better. Sure, the flaky golden brown outsides contain the standard soft airy interior, but I aim for perfection (is my OCD streak starting to show?). I want the honey comb like interior I experienced from true Parisian croissants.

Check out this great blog post about french croissants, he lets you see inside them! Look at those interiors! So delicate, you can tell how perfectly the dough has been laminated. Of course I'm wondering if such a croissant is possible at home (as I lack a bakery dough sheeter ). Nevertheless, I'm going to try again today.

Mr. Humble said this last batch was very good, insisting that they were the best homemade croissant he had ever had. Still, another go at them can't hurt. Besides, when the pain au chocolat were pulled from the oven, the natural light had faded and I didn't get any spectacular photos of my chocolate croissants. I need those photos. So back to the kitchen I go!

Chopping up my croissants so I--and everyone else--can peer inside
...just like with my macarons.

Tomorrow I'll post the results along with the recipes. Unless I decide a 4th batch is needed, in which case there will be napoleons up tomorrow.

Til then!