Layer Infinitum

Croissants. I think of three things related to this luscious pastry:

1: It’s hard to spell

2: It’s hard to make

3: It’s hard to stop eating them

Truth be told croissants, aren’t overly difficult to make. They just require a great deal of exactness and the execution of making them and they need a great deal of time; making them from scratch makes you wish you could watch paint dry.

You start by making the base dough which acts as an envelope so to speak for the butter square you will later add to the center, as shown below.  Once this butter is wrapped in the dough and properly sealed on all sides you can then proceed to roll it out and create the layers.

Croissants and puff pastry are, honestly, extremely similar in the process of making them.  The only real difference is that you have a rising time with croissants and no rising time for puff pastry. The reason, however, that both take longer than a few simple mixing motions and “presto!” you’re done, is in the flakes.  How do both types of pastry get so flaky and puffy? Well, the key is in the layers….

“What layers?”  you may ask yourself.  The layer upon layer of butter, the dough has a hunk of butter placed in the middle and it is wrapped like a package to keep it all contained inside that dough.  As you continue to roll the dough, the butter disburses and gets thinner, but it all changes when you give it the “business letter fold”.  By folding it over itself and rolling it out again, you then create layers of butter inside the dough.  After this process is repeated several times, there is so much butter disbursed through the dough that when it bakes all that butter creates rich, flaky layers.

So from the rising time, which is considerable, you also have to chill the dough between each fold and roll, and you will typically do anywhere from four to six folds.  In the end the execution was…..fine I suppose, not perfect.  The result was also merely alright.   Indeed, I feel I need a lot more practice with this type of pastry. Mainly it came down to shaping them properly and the final rise.  The final rise I put many of them too close together and most of them became slightly too warm as the recipe suggested putting a heating pad on top of a lid or second baking sheet above the croissants.  My heating pad, sadly, seemed to be too hot even on the lowest setting and melted the butter in a lot of the croissants, effectively ruining most of the work I put into them. But that’s why we practice, so we can fail horribly, have a quick two hour cry in the corner, dust ourselves off and try again.  So you can be sure there will be a round two of these.