A Complaint and a Screw Up

The new recipe suffers from the same issue with the butter-dough geometry that annoys me. This one is even worse - the butter would be outside the dough. Well, whatever, I rolled it out larger than they suggested.

I'm doing the three day prep, that'll actually work nicely with us getting fresh croissants for dinner tomorrow and then somewhat less fresh croissants for breakfast Tuesday. I think I might even use them for lunch bread. It's going to be a mixed bag of lunch breads this week! Today I made the normal no knead dough recipe but I just wadded the dough into little balls, flattened them out a bit and baked them for a while. They made amazing slider rolls. Crusty, but not too much, nice light crumb. Is there nothing the no knead recipe can't do?

Anyway, my big boo boo today in the lamination was to not rotate 90° on the second roll and tri-fold. Ooops. I suppose it's not hyper-critical. That plus the bread flour dough make two strikes already. Hopefully I will finish flawlessly.

Plus side - didn't see any evidence of butter streaks near the surface this time. Cool. Also used Finlandia butter, not sure if it will make a huge difference from Keller's.

Dough rolled out larger than the recipe called for

My butter "square"

Bonus pic of no knead slider rolls from standard no knead dough

New Recipe

New recipe courtesy of my chum Percy - http://www.finecooking.com/recipes/classic-croissants.aspx . Whipped up the dough, letting it sit overnight in the fridge. One fail - I didn't have all purpose flour so I used bread flour.

Results, Croissant run #3

Ok, so they turned out better than I had expected. I checked on them 10 minutes through the bake and saw them boiling away in a giant puddle of melted butter. Doh, I guess butter containment was somewhat less than 100%. So I took the tray out of the oven and slowly and carefully poured off the butter ocean. Popped them back in and voila. The recipe said 20 min, but that was woefully inadequate, took 30. Even then could have stayed in a bit longer. Otherwise pretty good. Very flaky, very buttery.

Roll them dough

Cut into triangles

Rolled into crescents

Ok, maybe not too bad

Cross section

So flaky

Leftover dough rolled into a chocolate croissant

Chocolatey inside

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.

Danish

Honestly the ciabatta experiment never really took off. The first attempt, while not perfect, was completely acceptable. And figuring out where to improve proved difficult.

Flirted briefly with tortillas. Again, first one came out pretty good - better than store bought.

The new hotness is danish (and maybe ideally croissants). The boys love danish, though rarely have it. And it seems like an impressive baking achievement. I have already tried to make croissants twice. Both abject failures. Not like, "well, it ain't pretty, but it's tasty" failures. Not like, "something is a little off" failures. Just complete fails. Terrible heavy lumps of inedible dough in pools of melted butter. Grotesque mockeries of croissants. It's time to figure out laminated dough.

French bread wrap up

Since the first ciabatta came out pretty good my motivation for that experiment has dissipated a bit, haha. I may continue, or pick a different style. It was good, and the boys liked it, but it doesn't make for good grilled cheese. Also technique seems far less important than recipe.

At any rate, I decided to do baguette again but this time to use the technique of pain d'epi to make a holiday wreath - make the loaf into a ring and then take the scissors to it and make a nice looking loaf that way. We'll see how it turns out.

Also wanted to take the opportunity to wrap up everything I learned about baguette making. Here are the key points.

• Recipe - http://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/classic-baguettes-and-stuffed-baguettes-recipe
• I used 260g of water in Oct/Nov. More water did not make for bigger holes in the crumb and made it a huge pain to knead.
• I prefer pointed ends in the baguette loaf.
• Use a razor blade to make deep long slashes.
• For Pain d'Epi cut deep into the loaf with scissors.
• Preheat the oven with a small metal pan in there. Throw ice cubes in that after putting the bread in and just before closing the oven door.
• Before placing the loaves in the oven, spray them with the sprayer from the sink so they're good and soaked.

Picture of the pain d'epi loaf coming shortly...

Here it is, going to call it pain de Noël since it's supposed to resemble a Christmas wreath.

And prior to cooking...