background:
croissants are probably my favorite pastry, and I have made them on a number of occasions (mostly birthdays and christmas morning). I’ve gotten to the point where I like the process and find it relaxing, but have never been quite satisfied. The “perfect” croissant should have a nice shattering shell and airy honeycomb insides that taste of a rich savory butter without being greasy.
most of the major lessons I’ve learned are not in the making of the dough, which comes with practice, but in the small techniques of forming, proofing, and baking. It sucks but most of my successes, near misses, and utter failures have come from this point.
The first major discovery was in the proofing. Often times my croissants would have the dreaded butter leakage during baking. I often thought it was temperature– too hot causing the better to melt i though, so I tried various ways to treat temperature. letting proof then popping in the fridge for 5 minutes to let butter harden, and various ways of altering the oven temp (high at first then lowered, or starting lower and then raised). After copious amount of reading, I discovered that the butter leakage actually comes from under-proofing. If the croissants are under-proofed then they will not be able to (maybe) retain, hold in, or whatever the butter and instead it will “squeeze” out. I cannot tell you how much of a difference that made, and I’m still playing that game now as proofing is something I’ve found difficult in basically every yeasted bread form. One day i’ll make a temperature and humidly controlled proof box that holds two half sheet racks, but until then I’m basically running on sticking a large tupperware container over a quarter sheet tray for about 3.5hrs until they are jiggly (technical term).
The second finishing technique problem I have (still have unfortunately) is getting the texture of the croissant right. Sometimes they result in a bit too dense and underdone in the center (which may come from being too rough or too slow when doing the turns–seriously if you know the answer and can point me in the direction of the answer please do). I used to make croissants and roll them up and freeze them, and then bake as needed. Now i think I will freeze the flat dough (at the point just before forming) as I think the thawing and proofing is affecting the center. When I proofed and baked without freezing in this most recent test they were not as doughy as usual and had a much more honeycomb texture. I could not, however, finish them completely no matter how long I left them in the oven (went 15 minutes longer and it made no apparent difference). Here we are talking about a quality issues of about 10%, but still. It’s frustrating after all these times not getting them right.
As to that savory buttery flavor, most of that comes from the european style butter which has a higher fat contend (though i did use one with a super high fat content but not as good flavor and they were lacking). Another flavoring factor is cold fermenting of the dough. This can be done by letting the pre-butter block dough (detrempe) rest in the fridge for a couple days. In bouchon bakery, they add a step of a poolish or a yeast starter. I generally make these croissants over about 2 days, so the combination of poolish and naturally occuring cold-ferment has really upped the flavor to where I like it to be.
For this trial, i made the bouchon bakery recipe, but left 25g flour out of the detrempe because I’m kind of a heavy hand with flour when rolling and folding the turns. I also tried something which is trimming the dough when folding to decrease having “dead dough” with in the folds and just have the nice clean layers. This worked well, though I’m not sure how much of it was the trimming vs. not freezing in the final result. I did lose about 10% probably though.
For an upcoming test, i might try dominique ansel’s recipe which uses bread flour as opposed to AP flour which is notoriously varied.
I’m about 87% satisfied with trial 1 (which for me, for a recipe at this stage is pretty damn good actually).
C
ps with the leftover dough scrape (from folded dough as opposed to cleaned up dead-dough ends) i rolled with sugar and made into kouign-amann. this is sort of like the canele though since I’ve never had one and not sure how they turned out. how they turned out is slightly caramelized, sugary (albeit ugly) croissants, which weren’t bad at all.
