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?!

Cloverleaf rolls v3.0

This recipe for cloverleaf rolls even says in its title that they are "fantastic".  This, unfortunately, was not my experience with them.  From an imbalance of liquid and dry ingredients to a lower yield, this was not anywhere near as good of an experience as I'd had on Wednesday with making cloverleaf rolls.

My notes:

• The recipe calls for 3 1/2 cups of flour, but I ended up using a little more than 4 cups, and even then I did not really get a dough, but more of a stiff batter.  I didn't want to add more flour because of a dire warning in the recipe about flour amount.  Maybe this was a mistake on my part.

Cake batter?

• There was a lot of liquid in this recipe: 3/4 c. water to dissolve the yeast, 1 c. milk, 1/4 c. melted butter, and 1 egg.  By contrast, the recipe I used on Wednesday only used a little over 1 c. milk, 1 egg, and 6 (not melted) tablespoons of butter.  Maybe this is why I should have added more flour.
• However, it did seem like a good idea to dissolve the yeast in what amounted to sugar water.  Get the yeast to really start eating before it even got to the flour, right?
• Because of the point at which I'd stopped adding flour, I ended up with what was essentially a thick batter, but a batter with gluten (there was definitely gluten forming in this stuff).  By the time I finished dividing the dough into 12 muffin cups, I felt like one of those people in the commercials for the faucets that you only need to hit with your wrist to get to turn on.  I had anticipated this and had, against my environmental science bachelor's degree, turned on the water before I started dealing with the dough.

Before 2nd rising: they look like biscuits, or something.  There was no way this stuff was going to be formed into any other shape than 'blob'.

After 2nd rising: at least they look more like rolls, now. 

They may not be "cloverleaf" rolls, but they turned out to be rolls nonetheless.

These turned out to be more like brioche: soft, buttery, sort of eggy, a little sweet.  This would have been great had I been going for something like a brioche (which, honestly, had been next on my list of breads to try), but this did not make for good cloverleaf roll dough.  The recipe had promised 12 large cloverleaf rolls, but I ended up with 12 comparatively smaller brioche.  So, this turned out to be not so bad of a result as I had thought at the start; I might keep the recipe around for brioche, but then I might just find a recipe that specifically says that it's for making brioche!

Cloverleaf rolls

Recently I became enamored with cloverleaf rolls.  The ones I had were soft, moist, at once pillowy yet dense, and more than twice the size of the muffin cups they'd been baked in.  So you see, I may have some unreasonable expectations when it comes to these things.

I really wanted to like this recipe.  I had the utmost faith in Joy of Cooking's methodology but the rolls I cooked up with its recipe came out more like hard biscuits than the pillowy creations I'd known before.  They didn't even fill the muffin cups of the pan when they came out of the oven.

Sad cloverleaf rolls.  At least the copious amount of nonstick spray worked as advertised.

This was my first time making yeast-leavened rolls; I've made biscuits in my time, but recipes for those can be summarized thus:

1. Mix.
2. Bake.
3. Consume.

I've also made pizza dough, but if I've been messing that one up, then those have been some tasty mistakes.

Looking back, perhaps it was a combination of errors that led to an unfortunate final product.  Let's see, shall we?

• It's probably best to make these on a day when it's cooler than 100°F outside; even with the air conditioning on, the rising times were altered and the 425° oven was not so pleasant.
• Punching down dough after the first rising is more important than I'd realized; we don't do this for pizza dough (and yet it's still darn tasty) and I haven't yet made many other breads.  Important!
• Just as it's important to let the dough rise, it's equally important to not let it rise for too long.  I suspect that this was the main culprit behind the hardtack biscuits that resulted.

So it's probably not the recipe itself that's to blame after all, but the ol' "user error".  We'll probably try this one again, but a lot of Interweb sleuthing has turned up four more promising recipes for cloverleaf rolls, all of which I intend to test.  Will I find a recipe that results in my vision of the ideal cloverleaf roll?  We shall see, shall we not?

Sad cloverleaf rolls are sad.

Joy of Cooking (2006), p. 610

Almond pudding/jelly/Jell-O

Whatever it might be called in a cookbook or at a restaurant, it's delicious.  I came across this recipe while flipping through a dim sum cookbook; I got the impression that the cookbook as a whole was designed for people like me who know and enjoy dim sum but are slightly nervous about attempting it at home.  Since the recipe in the book only required one ingredient that we didn't already have, I figured it was worth a try.

Unfortunately, the finished product had no business calling itself "something delicious that you would want to consume".  When I took the dish out of the fridge it was still a liquid and nowhere near set, even after 18 hours.  Upon closer inspection, I discovered some watery milk (milky water?) lying atop a sickly-sweet almond-flavoured morass of still-grainy gelatin.  It wasn't even one of those culinary mishaps that still taste all right, like the Great Annapolis Pizza Fiasco of 2009.  This went into the sink immediately.

Our notes:

• Total time elapsed from measuring out the sugar and water to putting it in the fridge to set: 15 minutes, from 11:01 PM to 11:16 PM.  Not too bad, though see the point below about letting the gelatin soften.
• There was a very strong almond flavor, more than even I would want in this dish.  Perhaps 1 or 1½ teaspoons would be more appropriate rather than the 2 specified, though this may not have been an issue had the gelatin set as expected.
• The recipe only said to let the gelatin soften for 5 minutes; the box of gelatin (consulted long after the fact) called for 10 minutes. Might this have been part of the issue?
• Apparently, you can't just go by appearances on this one: on the stove the water-sugar-gelatin solution looked like just that, but as we would discover later, the gelatin had not, in fact, dissolved into the sugar water.
• Like the red beans and rice experiment, this recipe seemed like it was designed for beginners, calling for gelatin rather than the more traditional agar. Next time we'll try and get actual agar; we live right down the street from a fairly large Asian grocery store so I don't think this will be a problem.

It's very sad when a recipe doesn't turn out even after following the directions to the letter.  We'll try a different recipe for almond pudding next time.


Blonder, Ellen. (2002). Dim sum: The art of Chinese tea lunch. New York: Clarkson Potter.