Suffice to say that my Spring and Summer became… er… busy. And, perhaps that busy-ness left me somewhat broken in spirit by the end of the summer. It wasn’t until late-September that I even felt like baking. I mean, it took until late-September for me to pick myself off of the floor enough to actually do laundry and eat something other than matzoh spread with peanut butter (both of which happened to already be lying about the house). (Actually, I ran out of peanut butter at some point and resorted to smearing butter on the matzoh.)

This recipe is the one that drew me back. Cook’s Illustrated does it again with a lovely article about Kouign Amann, and I felt motivated enough to both thaw butter and wake up my sourdough starter. Both a Kouign Amann and a sourdough loaf were produced on the same day. And maybe some laundry got done too.

I’m a noob with laminated dough, so this was the start of a learning curve that I’m still climbing. Some notes from this first attempt:

• I could tell that the butter broke into pieces within the dough on some of the earliest turns. The instructions to chill the dough/butter packet is complicated to me, because this instruction consistently causes the butter to get too cold to roll out. It took several weeks to find some solutions to this, but that story is for other posts.

• For this first attempt, you can see in the photo that I didn’t get the pretty scored diamonds that Cook’s has in their photo. This is because my dough became, essentially, butter-fried brioche, with the butter all mixed in and melting out into the pan. I mean, “butter-fried brioche” is still a wonder to eat, but it wasn’t what this recipe was going for.

• The dough in this recipe is rather high hydration, so it’s more liquid-y than dough-y. I would have been happier if they would have said so in the recipe instead of using words like “smooth and elastic” and “roll out” as opposed to “soft and bubbly” and “stretch out”. Their comments on their website clarified that it’s a liquid-y dough. BTW, this dough consistency adds to the problem with the butter breaking. The chilled butter is just too different in texture from a liquid-y dough. In my view, the butter needs to be rather soft to be folded with the high-hydration dough.