lamination

Croissants, Episode 3

/ Susie / Leave a comment
(a little pain au chocolat at the top!)

So, I wanted to try the updated croissant recipe that I saw in Joanne Chang’s newer cookbook, Pastry Love. In my comparison chart I refer to this as “Chang 2”. Here are the differences that I saw:

  • The newer recipe is for “spelt croissants” so the flour content is half spelt flour and half bread flour. Her original recipe is 3/4 all-purpose flour and 1/4 bread flour, but the overall flour volume is nearly the same, as is the flour to liquid ratio. I wasn’t interested in trying the spelt variation, but it seemed safe to stick with the original all-purpose/bread flour approach from the original recipe.
  • The newer recipe eliminates the step of mixing 2T of butter into the dough itself. That 2T of butter gets added into the butter block, so it’s not removed overall. It just doesn’t have to mixed into the dough. I appreciated the idea of saving some work, so I went with this change
  • Her lamination method is notably updated. Rather than book-fold/letter-fold/chill/letter-fold, this recipe has only two book-folds and that’s it. No mid-lamination chilling! Because of my prior issues with the butter breaking up after being chilled mid-lamination, I am especially excited about this change. And, it reduces the overall duration of the effort (because it takes away one chill step and one fold step). We’re now down to 16 layers (having already gone from 729 -> 36), and I haven’t seen a deterioration in the flakiness of the end result.

I should note that Joanne’s newer lamination method isn’t a classic “book fold”. I think of it as a “modified book fold” and haven’t seen it described anywhere else. It is essentially the same, and still creates the four layers as a regular book fold. The only difference is that all the dough ends are not concentrated in the middle of the dough packet. She offsets the “seam” a bit, and I think this is another tweak that helps maintain the structural integrity of the desired rectangular shape. It’s hard to explain the difference without just sending you to her book (Pastry Love), which has very helpful instructions and photos.

I love the idea that Joanne Chang and her team at Flour Bakery are looking for ways to improve things – even very good things. The lamination method has nothing to do with the spelt change, so this seems to be entirely a process improvement.

I think I haven’t explicitly mentioned that I make one Pain au Chocolat with each batch of croissants using any leftover bits of laminated dough. (You can see it in the first photo at the top of this post.) I mush the bits back together and roll them out into a rectangle, then roll up some dark chocolate batons and bake with the rest of the croissants. I have to say that these little treats, made from the “leftover bits”, have been such a delight that I think I will try to make more of an effort to allocate some proportion of the next batch to Pain au Chocolat – not just the scraps!

Kouign Amann

/ Susie / 1 Comment

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.