Croissants!

 Before I get going with this one I just want to mention a couple of things: 

1. These croissants are far from perfect, but for such a technical bake I wanted to show what an early attempt looks like for me, as I'm proud I even managed to make them look as good as they do!

2. Like a fool I didn't take a photo of the inside of the croissants. The photos I have of the final results are not the best, but the texture and bake on the finished croissants were so good that they felt like a triumph, despite their appearance!

With that out of the way, here's how my croissants turned out!

 

Displaying the croissants in a 
cute little bag to disguise how 
imperfect they are!

Making the dough for croissants is straight forward to begin with. You simply combine strong bread flour, salt, sugar, yeast, milk and water, and knead until a smooth dough forms. Veronica helped with this as a the dough is quite wet to start with so a food mixer makes this stage easier. It's at this point that the method becomes a little different. Some recipes call for the kneaded dough to be chilled overnight before it is rolled and folded, whilst others call for the dough to be chilled after it is rolled. Either way, the method for laminating the dough remains the same!

To laminate the dough, a quantity of cold butter is beaten down between two pieces of greaseproof paper into a relatively thin layer. It was only whilst reading the croissant recipe in the River Cottage Handbook that I learned the idea behind keeping the butter chilled is so that both the butter and the dough are of a similar firmness and pliability! The dough is then rolled out to twice the size of the butter, before the butter is placed over the bottom half of the dough. To form the layers, the top half is then folded over the bottom half, before being rerolled, folded into sixths, and rerolled again. By this point, layers of dough are interspersed with the layers of butter, which helps to create the flakey texture on the final bake!

There is absolutely no
consistency with these croissants!

After the dough, which is currently shaped like a book, is rolled out again, it's time to cut out the croissants. The recipe I followed called for 1kg of bread flour, meaning a lot of dough was produced! The trouble I had with this is that my work surface wasn't wide enough, even when I halved the dough! Rolling out the dough was quite challenging as a result, but I got there in the end.

Using a template, I then cut out triangles from the dough, and rolled them up from the thinnest edge. From the photos it's clear that my rolls are irregular, though as I used a cardboard template and a pizza wheel to cut out the croissants I'm not really sure where I went wrong... maybe I drew the wrong kind of triangle?

After placing the rolled up croissants on a baking sheet, I encountered my next problem. The shaped croissants require a second proof, but given the rising cost of electricity I felt as though I couldn't really justify having the central heating on for an hour to help the croissants rise. Maybe next time I'll put the heating on for a bit! 

Whilst baking, quite a lot of the butter seeped out of the croissants, but surprisingly the texture didn't seem to suffer too much! The next time I get a couple of days off in a row I'll revisit these to see what lessons I've learned, as both the flakey shells and fluffy interiors were brilliant! 

Gibby x