Hiccups

So the recipe is a little flaky (sweet pun there, did you see it?). It clearly calls for a 17 cm by 17 cm square of butter in Step 5. It also calls for rolling your dough into a 26 cm by 26 cm square. I hate when it asks you to roll something out into a square. It doesn't want to be a square. Anyway, they then lay the butter on the dough and it looks like this...

From the recipe website

Ok, fine, the butter is in the middle of the dough, big margin all the way around. Cool. Only given the dimensions they state for the butter pat and the dough "square", it would actually look like this...

Simulation of the geometry given their numbers

So, yeah. Looking at their Step 7, it seems the dough is more like 32 cm+ on a side, assuming that rules is ticked off in cm. Anyway, I dealt with the discrepancy by rolling my dough flatter, into a bigger square. I suppose that's what they did as well, though that's not what the directions say. Anyway, the important thing is that I seem to be on the right path so far.

The only other hiccups are a couple little, shall we say, nurdles, in the dough - little tiny pieces of hard dough from my work surface that have stuck to the sheet. I don't really want to pick them out lest I puncture the sheet. Maybe it's not big deal and they won't be noticeable in the final product.

Oh, and I saw a stripe of butter that has possibly broken through the dough.That's probably a bigger boo boo. I folded the dough so it's on the inside, maybe it will be ok.

The dough feels pretty good. I think the consistency is right. I guess we'll see how it turns out.

Croissants, The Beginning

So I finally found the time, well, ok, carved out the time, to work on croissants. I followed the recipe in https://snapguide.com/guides/make-the-perfect-croissant/ . First I made up the dough. I did follow the recipe properly and use unsalted butter for both the dough and the butter slab. I don't always do that. For the dough, I did heat up the butter in the microwave - it was perhaps half melted and half soft. I didn't have too much choice as at "room temperature" in my cold-assed house the butter was still very firm. I assumed that 140 ml of milk weighed 140 g, which is not quite accurate, but pretty close. At any rate I added a splash of water at the mixing phase because the dough was too crumbly. I did not have "fast action" yeast, I hope "active dry" is similar enough. I did not have caster sugar, I used granulated. Here's the dough at the end:

My less than smooth dough

It could have been made smoother, but I feared that additional mixing in the KitchenAid with the kneading hook would make it harder to work with, as the recipe warns.

The butter was a much more challenging task. I cut it into slabs and rolled it between to sheets of waxed paper. The waxed paper tore twice and have to be replaced. The square is not perfect, but it's pretty close. I hope that's not critical. I still see seams in the butter between the butter slabs. Assume those will be ironed out in the end.

My less than square butter square

Dough and butter resting in the fridge overnight.