Adventures in croissant-making
Feb. 18th, 2013 09:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rebeccmeisterA couple of years ago, a friend and I got into some discussion about whole-wheat croissants. She was incredulous. But I grew up eating them, about once a week: my parents would buy them while out grocery-shopping, as PCC carried some made by Touchstone Bakery. We would toast them for breakfast, and spread on butter or peanut butter and jam. Delicious! Unfortunately, when I went back to Seattle to find some for DM, I learned that Touchstone Bakery had gone out of business. Truly sad to see them go. For a little while, PCC carried whole-wheat croissants from Vancouver Croissants, but as of my last visit to Seattle those appear to have disappeared as well.
I should note that whole-wheat croissants aren't the same as white flour croissants, which tend to be much easier to come by. Also, I'm partially after the whole-wheat ones just for the culinary challenge. I've read plenty of opinions about not bothering, and that's fine for you, but I'll carry on.
Anyway, in the face of all of this, a couple of years ago I thought, well, I managed to create a cupcake that made me stop craving the cupcakes from Cupcake Royale. Perhaps I can make a whole-wheat croissant as well. I spent some time reading about the subject in publications from the San Francisco Baking Institute (directed there via this discussion thread), and then decided to just give it a go one weekend. Well. My results were somewhat like what happened to this person, except worse, actually. I tried to get the dough to laminate with the butter, except the butter was too hard and the dough was too soft, so I just wound up redistributing butter chunks throughout the dough. Fast-forward to baking, where the butter melted and dripped into the bottom of the oven, creating a smoky mess. I really couldn't call the resulting objects "croissants." They were more like smoky butter rolls. Barely edible. Discouraging.
For Christmas this year,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
scrottie gave me a rolling pin I'd been lusting after. It's made of mesquite, and was handmade by someone in the Phoenix area - a beautiful, functional item, my favorite. A nice Arizona connection, too, and it's a French-style one with tapered ends. Just from looking at it and picking it up to feel its heft, I had the sense that it would do an excellent job. And pretty much anything would work better than the wine bottles I'd been using previously.
Well, it has done a sufficiently good job that I've started to consider trying my hand at croissant-making again. This time around, I decided it would be better to start more humbly, using a white-flour recipe, and I happened to find a well-illustrated one on Instructables. The first step, wrapping the butter, is a brilliant one.
So, yesterday I attempted croissants again, round one. A thing you should know about croissant-making - the whole process involves rolling out the dough, then refrigerating it, a number of times. Somewhere around four or five times. This has to be done to ensure that the consistency of the butter and dough are similar enough that you don't wind up with butter chunks. So it's an activity that's best done on the weekend, interspersed between other projects. I started at 7 am and baked the first one at 9 pm.
This recipe also included a second rather critical component that had been missing from my prior attempt, the use of "stretching butter." This is butter with some flour incorporated, which makes it more malleable and thus easier to work with. The one thing I'd do differently next time is that this time around I thought I'd try using the KitchenAid's dough hook to prepare the stretching butter. It worked reasonably well, but there were still a couple of butter chunks left. It's worth it to take the time to ensure the stretching butter has a nice, smooth consistency, so it would benefit from use of the paddle or good arm strength and a wooden spoon.
After I shaped the croissants, I tucked most of them into the freezer. My plan for this week is to pull some out of the freezer in the evening, and then bake them in the toaster oven in the morning so I can have fresh-baked croissants for breakfast. I have to tell you that breakfast this morning was pretty amazing.
For transitioning to whole wheat, I have to look around at other recipes again. I'm also thinking of experimenting along two lines. The first is just trying a mixture of white and wheat flour, to see if that retains enough gluten action to continue stretching well without ripping. The second attack I'm considering is just adding additional gluten. We shall see. For now, I'm mostly just happy to have had this initial success.
I should note that whole-wheat croissants aren't the same as white flour croissants, which tend to be much easier to come by. Also, I'm partially after the whole-wheat ones just for the culinary challenge. I've read plenty of opinions about not bothering, and that's fine for you, but I'll carry on.
Anyway, in the face of all of this, a couple of years ago I thought, well, I managed to create a cupcake that made me stop craving the cupcakes from Cupcake Royale. Perhaps I can make a whole-wheat croissant as well. I spent some time reading about the subject in publications from the San Francisco Baking Institute (directed there via this discussion thread), and then decided to just give it a go one weekend. Well. My results were somewhat like what happened to this person, except worse, actually. I tried to get the dough to laminate with the butter, except the butter was too hard and the dough was too soft, so I just wound up redistributing butter chunks throughout the dough. Fast-forward to baking, where the butter melted and dripped into the bottom of the oven, creating a smoky mess. I really couldn't call the resulting objects "croissants." They were more like smoky butter rolls. Barely edible. Discouraging.
For Christmas this year,
scrottie gave me a rolling pin I'd been lusting after. It's made of mesquite, and was handmade by someone in the Phoenix area - a beautiful, functional item, my favorite. A nice Arizona connection, too, and it's a French-style one with tapered ends. Just from looking at it and picking it up to feel its heft, I had the sense that it would do an excellent job. And pretty much anything would work better than the wine bottles I'd been using previously.Well, it has done a sufficiently good job that I've started to consider trying my hand at croissant-making again. This time around, I decided it would be better to start more humbly, using a white-flour recipe, and I happened to find a well-illustrated one on Instructables. The first step, wrapping the butter, is a brilliant one.
So, yesterday I attempted croissants again, round one. A thing you should know about croissant-making - the whole process involves rolling out the dough, then refrigerating it, a number of times. Somewhere around four or five times. This has to be done to ensure that the consistency of the butter and dough are similar enough that you don't wind up with butter chunks. So it's an activity that's best done on the weekend, interspersed between other projects. I started at 7 am and baked the first one at 9 pm.
This recipe also included a second rather critical component that had been missing from my prior attempt, the use of "stretching butter." This is butter with some flour incorporated, which makes it more malleable and thus easier to work with. The one thing I'd do differently next time is that this time around I thought I'd try using the KitchenAid's dough hook to prepare the stretching butter. It worked reasonably well, but there were still a couple of butter chunks left. It's worth it to take the time to ensure the stretching butter has a nice, smooth consistency, so it would benefit from use of the paddle or good arm strength and a wooden spoon.
After I shaped the croissants, I tucked most of them into the freezer. My plan for this week is to pull some out of the freezer in the evening, and then bake them in the toaster oven in the morning so I can have fresh-baked croissants for breakfast. I have to tell you that breakfast this morning was pretty amazing.
For transitioning to whole wheat, I have to look around at other recipes again. I'm also thinking of experimenting along two lines. The first is just trying a mixture of white and wheat flour, to see if that retains enough gluten action to continue stretching well without ripping. The second attack I'm considering is just adding additional gluten. We shall see. For now, I'm mostly just happy to have had this initial success.
