James MacGuire's been writing some very technical articles about French baking techniques in the Art of Eating magazine. His article in issue number 93, "Crisp, tender, old-fashioned croissants" looked like a challenge I had to try. It's a long article and very detailed, involving measuring, paper templates, sequences of folds, and refrigerated rests to prevent the butter from melting while retaining plasticity. It's very similar to "Crescent Rolls (Croissants)" in the book Jacques Pépin's Complete Techniques (2001). I hope the ASCII art diagrams and photos below help illustrate these techniques.
Good quality butter is important; we used a Kerrygold unsalted from our local store as it had the highest fat content. It's important that the butter be neither too cold to fold nor so warm that it melts; this probably means you can't make croissants in a hot kitchen in the summer. I beat the butter into a square where MacGuire spreads a cylinder, but the rest of the technique is his.
This recipe runs over two days: make the dough and fermenting overnight, then forming, rising, and baking. This means if you start the forming in the morning, you'll have to wait until the afternoon to eat your croissants. I'd like to try retarding the risen croissants so I can bake them in the early morning.
Ingredients
For 16 croissants.
500 g all-purpose Flour
35 g Sugar
12 g Salt
15 g instant dried Yeast
120 g Whole Milk (cold)
260 g warmish Water (to compensate for cold milk)
250 g unsalted Butter, preferably cultured, chilled
Egg Wash:
1 Egg
1 generous pinch salt
Procedure
A day ahead, make the dough
The day before baking, mix Flour, Sugar, Salt and Yeast, then add Milk and Water, and mix 1-2 minutes to form a shaggy dough. Wait 5 minutes then knead just until smooth, 2-3 minutes.
Cover the dough with plastic and let ferment 3 hours at ambient kitchen temperature, 70F or 21C, folding the dough onto itself after 1, 2, and 3 hours. Cover with plastic and refrigerate overnight.
The next day, add the butter and laminate
Take the dough from the refrigerator (it should be 40F, 4C) and place on a lightly floured counter, lightly flour the dough. Pat into a 10x30 inch rectangle. Fold into thirds to create a 10 inch square. Refrigerate 1 to 1 1/2 hours to allow the dough to relax.
Just before removing the dough from the refrigerator, cut the butter into 4 or 5 pieces and beat it with a rolling pin between cling film to "plastify" it. Roll it out so it's a 10x10 inch square; you could do this in a large zip-top baggie, which is 10 1/2 square if you stay clear of the edges or roll the dough a little larger. After beating, it should be 60F, 15C.
Roll the dough sideways to form a 10x18 inch rectangle and use the rolling pin to make an indentation 4 inches from the left and 4 inches from the right. Time for some ASCII art:
+----+----------+----+
| : : |
| : : |
| : : | 10
| : : |
| : : |
+----+----------+----+
4 10 4
This will leave a 10 inch square in the center with flaps like the open doors of a cupboard. Place the 10x10 inch square of butter in the center and fold the flaps over the butter to shut the cupboard, and pinch shut the seam and the top and bottom edges of the dough to seal in the butter.
If the dough has become too warm and pliable, so the butter may squeeze out in rolling, refrigerate for 10-15 minutes, but not long enough to let the butter harden.
Flour your counter and roll out the dough to a 10x30 inch rectangle -- left to right, if your counter is a conventional 24 inches deep. Fold this in 3, left side to the center, right side to the center, so it's once again a 10 inch square.
+----------+----------+----------+
| : : |
| : : |
| : : | 10
| : : |
| : : |
+----------+----------+----------+
10 10 10
Again, if the dough seems too warm, refrigerate a few minutes -- if butter ever shows, stop immediately, seal it back inside the dough, and cool the dough.
Rotate the dough 90 degrees so the folds are facing toward and away from you, the ragged edges will be on left and right. Again roll it out, left to right, to a 10x30 inch wide rectangle, and fold in thirds again.
Refrigerate again for 30-40 minutes; the interior of the dough should be 55F, 12C.
Shape the croissants
Cut the dough in half down its length from folded end to folded end (ragged edges will be on right and left). You'll have two 5x10 inch pieces. Put one piece in the refrigerator while working on the other.
Roll the piece into a 7 1/2 by 20 inch strip. Trim 1/8 inch of dough from the two long sides to expose the inner layers which provide more texture when baked. Cut 8 triangles from the dough by cutting it in half, and each half in half, then cutting a diagonal through each.
+--+--+--+--+
| /| /| /| /| 7 1/2
|/ |/ |/ |/ |
+--+--+--+--+
5 5 5 5
Roll the triangles up into croissants, pulling gently on the pointed end as you go to maintain a taut shape; I gently squished the tip to the countertop to keep it from moving. Rotate the formed croissant so the point comes a third of the way down the roll, then gently curve the ends toward the side with the point. You don't have to curve them, they look great either way, but "croissant" comes from "crescent" and the shape is traditional.
Set on a cookie sheet, orienting them diagonally so they all fit with room to grow. Repeat with the second piece of dough from the refrigerator.
Rise and bake
Rise at about 80-82F (27-28C) with enough humidity that the surface doesn't dry out. If your kitchen's cool, try putting them in an oven with the light on (a pilot light will likely make it too warm). In our 70F kitchen, the oven with the light on was 82F, perfect. If it's not warm enough, pre-heat it briefly to bring it up to temperature then turn off the heat. If you need humidity, you could fill a pan with hot water and put it in the bottom of the oven. Check the temperature with a thermometer to be sure you're not overheating your dough: you don't want to melt the butter.
Rising takes 1 1/2 - 2 hours. The croissants are ready for baking when they look like baked croissants -- puffy and round with no flattening out -- and when you touch them with a finger they have a slight springiness. Preheat the oven with convection to 375F (400F without); make sure you remove the rising croissants if you're using the oven to rise the dough!
Whisk the Egg with a generous pinch of Salt. With a soft-bristled pastry brush, coat the croissants with the wash. Bake to a rich golden brown, about 15-20 minutes.
You gonna eat that?
These were great fresh out of the oven while still warm. After cooling thoroughly, we froze them in zip-top bags and found they were quite good reheated in a toaster oven after defrosting.
We rolled good quality chocolate pieces into some of our croissants; you don't need much if the chocolate is intense.
Questions and future work
I really need to find a way that I can make the dough one day (and ferment overnight), shape the dough the next, then retard and bake early in the morning of the third day. Can the shaped rolls be risen completely in the fridge, like I do with my bread which I rise over 2-3 days? Do I have to rise them a bit on the second day, then retard in fridge, then bake the next morning? If I've retarded them in the fridge, do I need to let them warm up before baking, or can I bake them directly from cold?We tried freezing one unrisen, shaped croissant, and it didn't rise well later. We let another shaped croissant rise, then put it in a container, then baked the next day but we found it stuck to the container so it lost its shape.
MacGuire says that if you freeze butter then let it thaw out, the emulsified droplets of water come together more, and if you work the butter for layered pastry, water will appear on the surface. This suggests that making and rising the croissants, then freezing them for later baking may sacrifice texture.
We almost always keep our butter in the freezer, taking out a stick only as needed; does this also impact texture, using previously frozen butter? A comparison seems in order, if it weren't so much work.
McGuire also notes that butter which becomes warm then is chilled, it loses it's plasticity and becomes harder than original.
Can we use 2% milk instead of whole Milk plus Water? The goal of the above cold Milk plus warm water is to provide a warmish, presumably to encourage the Yeast. Pépin says 90-100F is good. Can we use 2% Milk that's a bit above room temperature?
If I beat out the butter in a zip-top baggie, it can be pre-formed then stored in the freezer. This could be a time-saver if I made croissants regularly.
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