Croissants

I didn't particularly like croissants as a kid, but once I started, there was no stopping it: I was on a mission to find the best croissants in Ann Arbor.  Along the way, I discovered what gives croissants their unique structure; I also realized that perhaps there should be some kind of limit to how frequently I buy these.  Like any food that I take a shine to, I checked our handy Joy of Cooking to see if I could possibly make these myself; even knowing that croissants can be finicky, I was still a little put off by the fact that the recipe spanned 2.5 columns (their recipes are rarely more than one column).  I also didn't feel up to trying to combine butter with flour while also trying to keep the butter's temperature low.

I requested the Bouchon Bakery cookbook from the library to check out their macaron recipe, but it turns out that their croissant recipe doesn't require the step of combining butter with flour, so I thought that this was as good a time as any to try making croissants.

The entire process took about 19 hours; I started during the 4th quarter of a Monday Night Football game, and the croissants were ready for dinner on Tuesday.  Good thing I wasn't working when I made these.

16 December, about 11 PM: Poolish is now fermenting.  If ever there was a good time to use the lesser-quality Target brand plastic wrap instead of the superior Saran Wrap, this was it, since the recipe called for the poolish to be covered loosely at this point.

17 December, about 10.45 AM: The poolish looks like the picture in the book!

Dough, post-mixing: the dough-making process would have been a little easier with instant yeast (which is what the recipe called for) instead of active dry; I wouldn't have had so much issue with regulating the amount of liquid in the dough had I just gone out and bought the instant yeast.

About 11.45 AM: After some minutes of rolling and shaping, the dough is ready to rest for an hour.

This is a pretty good sign, so far.  It's ready to be rolled out!

This is why I feel the need to hit the gym every day.

This, I believe, was probably "Turn 1"; the recipe called for three such turns (roll/flatten the packet of dough, then fold like a business letter).  This entire process of turns (apparently called "laminating") took about an hour and 40 minutes total, since you pop the dough packet into the freezer in between turns to keep its temperature down.

About 2.50 PM: They look like crescent rolls, but better.  Now to proof for two hours!

5 PM: Ready for the oven!  They have a lot of potential here.  I was able to make two baking sheets' worth of croissants, with 11 or 12 on each one.

6 PM: A batch fresh out of the oven.  Unfortunately, they didn't puff as much as they should have.

Sad crumb, but the end result was something like a flaky brioche; the outer layers were flaky, but the rest of the crumb had a more uniform but very rich texture.

Of course, I didn't expect croissants worthy of a boulangerie on my first attempt, but it was still a bit of a bummer as I'd put so much time into these.  I have two hypotheses as to why these didn't turn out.  At first, I suspected that something had gone wrong in the laminating stages, like I'd let the butter get too warm, and thus it had become incorporated into the dough instead of remaining separate to give the finished croissant its flaky layers.

But then in chatting with my mom, we thought that perhaps the oven had not been hot enough.  The outer layers of the croissants were all flaky and certainly made a bit of a mess when biting into them, so I had done something correctly; then I remembered that I had seen distinct layers of dough and butter when I had cut the triangles for each croissant, so maybe it wasn't entirely my fault.  The recipe noted different temperatures for convection ovens versus conventional ovens, and I had made sure to use the temperature for the 'regular' oven.  In thinking about it though, when making macarons, I have had to experiment with higher and higher temperatures to see what works for my oven; my macaron book lists a temperature for convection ovens, and only notes that people with regular ovens may have to set the temperature maybe 10 degrees higher (which I have had to exceed).  So maybe oven temperature was the culprit?  Perhaps at a higher temperature, the butter on the insides of the croissants won't have as much of a chance to melt directly into the dough?

It's worth trying again, but it was a lot of time and effort, and I still have a bunch of frozen brioche-croissants in my freezer, since I didn't even think these were nice enough to give to friends.  But I suppose if I'm to make my favored type of almond croissant--dough rolled with almond filling, not day-old croissant split in half and filled with pastry cream--I should just do it myself as those tend to be more difficult to find than the pastry cream version.

And I still haven't found any croissants as tasty as those from Zingerman's, though the boulangerie at the corner of Rue Grimaldi and Rue Princesse Caroline in Monaco was a close second if only for its location.


Thomas Keller and Sebastien Rouxel, Bouchon Bakery (2012), p.236-243 (!)
Writeup background noise: New Orleans Saints vs. Philadelphia Eagles.  Saints win?!