Croissants
Last weekend, I decided to make homemade croissants, from scratch. I knew by reputation that it wouldn’t be an easy task, but since I am a bit of a food purist and I like croissants, I decided to take on the challenge. I was leafing through the cookbook of Tartine, Meagan’s favorite bakery from her days in San Francisco. Their recipe, while traditional and complex, was detailed enough that I felt like I had a good chance of success.
Meagan, who is generally cautiously supportive of me in such endeavors, had one request: make them during the day. She didn’t want me trying to time their completion for breakfast by starting at 3 am and having me end up tired and frustrated. Reasonable enough. Plus, the recipe has a lot of long periods of resting and chilling the dough, so it turns out that most of the work is done the day before you want to bake them anyway.
I started on Friday night by making what’s called the “pre-ferment”, a simple dough that forms the base of the recipe and which is supposed to rise for a few hours, or overnight in the refrigerator. However, when I checked on Saturday morning, it hadn’t risen too much, so I figured the yeast was bad, and went to the store for more supplies, and started again. It only set me back about three hours.
The rest of Saturday consisted of timing dough-making around other errands. The steps involved in making croissants were generally, at a high level, twenty minutes of work followed by three to six hours of chilling the dough. One of the last dough preparation steps involves taking an unholy, ungodly amount of butter, smearing it on the top of the rolled out dough, and then folding the dough over itself several times. Once that step is done, it goes into the refrigerator for its final resting phase. While the dough was resting, I took care of other things, including taking Lulu to her favorite place, Magnusson Park, where she could be chased by other dogs.
On Sunday, I got up early to form the croissants, which, at the end of the day, are really just triangles of dough rolled together. We then let them rise for two hours, during which time we again took Lulu to the park.
When we got back, it was clear these were going to be some pretty large croissants. When I was rolling out the dough the night before, I couldn’t quite get it down to the recommended thickness, and this failure led to thicker than normal dough and therefore some big croissants. But they looked pretty good nonetheless.
Into the oven they went, and about twenty-five minutes, we had some freshly baked, loaf-size croissants. They were good. And buttery. And large. But mostly good.
It will be a while before I try this again, but mostly because they’re really not the most healthy things in the world, not because it was that hard. I did, however, order a new rolling pin (per the recommendation of Cook’s Illustrated, of course), which will hopefully let me get the dough to the proper size and result in some more manageable pastries. But I highly recommend the Tartine cookbook and this recipe to any dedicated cook who wants to try making croissants – they’re definitely doable.
I took some pictures of the final steps.
Shaped and ready for final rising.
Ready for the final rise – you can see the multiple folds of dough, separated by butter, which gives them their distinctive flakiness.
Brushing them with an egg-wash before baking.
Feed me!
Done!
Big, but delicious.
