I like Croissants. We buy them pretty much every weekend for breakfast so i thought i would see if i could make them myself! Shouldn’t be too hard i thought. Well as it turns out, it probably isn’t too hard, just that it takes THREE DAYS to make the dough. Three days. i had no idea. Anyway, i found a pretty good video on youtube by a chef called Pino Ficara, he makes it look incredibly easy and i am about to find out.
Here is the video:
Now his measurements aren’t entirely easy to get so here they are translated into sensible metric.
350ml whole milk, warm (38ºC) – i think 38ºC might be a tad too warm for the yeast so i would say somewhere between 25 and 30ºC should be OK
1 teaspoon dry yeast
450gram all purpose flour (heckers or king arthur) – i’ve no idea what these brands of flour are so i am using just ordinary plain flour
1/2 tsp salt
70gram sugar
285gram butter (plugra or french butter) – just using normal supermarket butter, i am sure this will be my downfall.
for egg wash: 1 eggs, 2 yolks, 1 pinch of salt, 1 pinch of sugar, 2 tbsp whole milk
Here they are in crazy talk:
12oz whole milk, warm (100F)
1 tsp dry yeast
1 lb ap flour (heckers or king arthur)
1/2 tsp salt
2.5oz sugar
10oz butter (plugra or french butter)
–
Ok so what i did was pretty much follow that video. Mixes all the ingredients together and wrapped the dough in plastic wrap. This is what i got. Crappy photo sorry got only phone camera here.
Nicely wrapped up bundle of dough. It is now in the fridge for the next 8 hours. See you then.
Ok so it looked pretty rad after 8 hours in the fridge. it was almost about to explode.
Very very hard to work with the butter in this heat (It’s around 30 degrees inside my house right now!). Here is the butter keeping cool.
Now it has been in the fridge again after incorporating the butter into the dough and it hasn’t risen much. i might not have rolled it enough afterwards. Will see what it looks like in the morning!
Well this morning it was a bit of a disappointment. Seems like i had not rolled the butter into the dough enough so it hardly rose again in the fridge. It did smell quite spectacular tho! I rolled it out into two sheets like so:
And then cut it into tiangles:
Here they are all rolled up and proofing again on the bench! So many proofings required!
Here are the finished croissants. about 15mins in the oven at 200C. As you can see they are quite puny, i put this down to me stuffing the dough up last night after incorporating the butter.
I also made some Pain au Chocolat! Now these turned out awesomely! I actually rolled some of the scrap dough up again and again so it had many more layers of butter and dough. So they turned out incredibly light and fluffy and crispy like a normal croissant should! I put in some dark chocolate.
So there you have it. An almost successful attempt at making croissants. Very time consuming and after a few goes i’m sure i will get it down. It should be a little easier when it isnt so hot inside the kitchen!
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omfg! amazing! my pa used to make croissants every sunday. i am a practiced roller.
yes! i will make them again! whenever we see you again i will make them and make you roll them! ha hah!
Small croissants might be because he says tablespoon not teaspoon of yeast!
yeah i was thinking about that. 1 tablespoon seemed like a HEAP of yeast! i was affraid it might explode in teh fridge huhu. next time i will use 1tbsp!